Reading Comprehension on the LSAT | Common Mistakes

Alright, Scott here again, here to answer your LSAT questions. Let's see what the next one is. What are some common mistakes people make when tackling reading comprehension? People make a lot of mistakes in reading comprehension. Reading comprehension for the LSAT is different than the way you're used to reading. If you're reading a novel, you wouldn't be necessarily interested in the motivation for the author putting anything in it. If you're reading a textbook, you don't care why the author has put the stuff in the textbook. All you care about is remembering names, dates, and places so that when you get tested later, you can just write it down on a piece of paper and hopefully get an A. On the LSAT, it's completely different. You're always motivated by what is the author doing and why is the author doing this. That gives you content and it gives you structure. People make huge mistakes in not following that path. What they'll end up doing is reading for detail. The details don't matter. You get bogged down in the passage. By the time they get to the end of the passage, you're running out of time. It's not about that. It's about pulling out the major ideas. Other mistakes people make is they read too fast. They skip past everything and they go straight to the questions and then they end up having to dig that information back out of the passage again and re-read it multiple times. It ends up taking them even longer. Some place in between those two things is a happy medium. That's where you want to live when you're doing reading comprehension for the LSAT.