The first thing you must know about reading comprehension is that the real battle starts in your mind. Well, as someone fortunate enough to have gotten the perfect score in Verbal for both the GRE and the GMAT, I have three simple methods for getting around this problem.


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My advice is different from what I have seen elsewhere, and the second and third methods might be a little controversial, but what can I say? They have worked perfectly for me.

First things first, you have to dismiss the negative thoughts immediately if you want to really succeed on reading comprehension and understand passages more intuitively.

If your brain suspects that you hate the text you are looking at and regard the information as useless, it will skim over the information and delete most of it before it can be stored in memory.
That is why you can come to the end of a passage and feel like you haven’t remembered anything.
Has that happened to you?

So many students have said this to me over the years and asked me how I can ace so many ‘boring’ passages, science passages, or history texts.

The truth is that you must convince yourself that the passages are not boring. When that thought comes into your brain intercept it and say ‘NO! I really want to learn about this topic so I can be an informed person. Forget the exam, I actually want to know.’

The same applies for reading articles, essays and books in real life.

Reading is not a chore, it is an opportunity to learn something new, maybe something that can change your perspective on life.

If I trace back the origin of many of the key turning points in my life, I can usually find an article, an essay or a book.

So, you are not lying to your brain when you say ‘this text could be really important.’

For exams, use your imagination to make the words stick. Create dialogue in your head to help yourself stay interested. Things like ‘Oh wow, I never knew that’ or ‘That’s so weird, who knew?’.
Yes, it does sound kind of crazy, but it really works.

This encourages your brain to retain the information. I will do a full example at the end of the video to demonstrate the technique.

A fancy way of naming this technique is to call it critical engagement with the text. Argue with what’s being said, agree with it, disagree with it, reply to it and predict where it is going.
All of this counts as critical engagement, and all of it helps your brain to digest the information into memory.

2. Read more slowly. More slowly than you read Twitter, WhatApp messages or YouTube comments.
Read … at … a … calm … and … careful … speed.

I sometimes say to students that I aim to be the slowest person in the room to read the passage and the fastest person to answer the questions. People ask me whether you should read the question first or the passage but I have done both and I don’t think it matters much. How deliberately you read is much more important.

In Reading Comprehension tests, the brain takes time to process unfamiliar nouns, so especially slow down when you get to the denser portions of the text.

I also don’t take notes, which saves some time. I know some students do, and other organisations recommend it, but I feel the passages are short enough that if I read slowly, I retain the core ideas in my head.

Writing often takes a fair bit of time and people rarely look back at their notes. If it works for you and you can do it within the time allowed, awesome.

For those for whom English is not a first language, reading slower may mean saving time elsewhere in the Verbal exam, such as guessing the hardest Sentence Equivalence or Sentence Correction sections. But answering most passages thoughtfully is more important than answering all of them badly.

Method 3. Stop and summarise. If you can’t quickly summarise the sentence you have just read, you haven’t really understood it. That’s why I always stop at the end of every sentence or two and ask myself if I understand what’s going on. If not, I re-read.

For tests, the creators of the question know which sentences are most confusing, and often test topics discussed in those sentences.

Yes, it takes time, but this is time we can buy back by answering the questions more confidently.
Some of you are probably thinking ‘but what if I just can’t understand a sentence, even with re-reading?’.

This could be because the syntax, or structure, of the sentence is just super-baffling or badly written,
or because you don’t understand a keyword or two.


I offer private GRE / GMAT tutoring online at a fixed rate of $140/hr. Please get in touch via the email below, or through my tutoring website: https://www.gretutorlondon.com/

Enquiries: [email protected]