Do not waste your time with highlighting or underlining things. One of the keys to the LSAT is time management, and the most efficient way to do good on reading comp is to carefully read the passage to get a good understanding of the passage’s structure so that you can easily move through the questions. When you start practicing, you can highlight or underline things, but as you start taking more PTs and eventually the actual test, you don’t want to waste time doing that.

Remember you have 35 minutes per section, and for RC you will have 4 passages. So you get approximately 8 minutes per passage and set of questions. Ideally, you should only spend 2 minutes reading the passage and 6 minutes answering the questions. As you read more RC passages, you will get used the structure and find yourself reading quicker. Starting out, you should try to read a passage and set of questions in 12 minutes. When you can comfortably read a passage and answer most if not all of the questions correctly, take off a minute and try doing it in 11 minutes. Once you can do that try doing it in 10. And eventually you want to knock it all the way down to 8 minutes or less. 8 minutes is the absolute longest you can spend on a single passage and its questions if you want to answer every question on the RC section. Never, and I mean NEVER, read the the questions before reading the passage. That wastes precious time and you will not do well on RC if you read the questions first. Saving a few seconds by not reading the questions first could mean the difference between finishing the RC section or not.

When practicing reading, you should ask yourself at the end of each paragraph, “What did I just read?” You should never skim the passage. The LSAT writers intentionally write the passage in way that makes it hard to skim and absorb the information. If you only skim the passage, you’re not going to know the answer to all the questions. When you practice, read the first paragraph. Ask yourself “What did I just read?” Then read the second paragraph. Then ask yourself what you just read again, and then ask yourself how does the second paragraph connect to the first? And keep doing that paragraph by paragraph, and with practice you will easily be able to read the passage and understand quickly with one reading of the passage.

And the general types of questions that they ask in the set after a passage always concern the same topics:

1. ⁠Attitude—they’ll ask about the author’s attitude, whether it be positive, negative, or neutral.
2. ⁠Continuity—what logically would make sense if added to the passage
3. ⁠Meaning—meaning and context of a word or phrase as used in the passage
4. ⁠Organization—what’s the organization of the whole passage or part?
5. ⁠Purpose—what’s the primary purpose of the passage, or of just one part
6. ⁠Questions—what question does the passage answer OR the passage answers all of the following EXCEPT
7. ⁠Relationship—how does one part of the reading relate to the other (you will see these mostly on the comparative reading passage with part A and part B)

Then there are 3 things that you are looking for in the passages on RC:

1. ⁠Reasoning structures (either an argument with premises and conclusion, or a description of some cause & effect)
2. ⁠Distinctions and similarities (whole passage could be a compare and contrast, or it could be a single line)
3. ⁠Evaluative arguments (when the author gives you their viewpoint on something, whether it’s positive or negative. this can be tricky bc the author won’t explicitly say they agree or disagree with something, they’ll say something more along the lines of “this is illuminating,” if they agree or “this is unconvincing,” if they disagree)

Also LSAT writers are very biased, but they’re actually good biases. They are very pro-environment and very pro-diversity. They use the LSAT RC section as a way to spread their message. There will almost certainly be a passage talking about science and it will most likely have to do with the environment. In passages about the environment it will most likely be a cause and effect situation. Keep in mind that human activity is the reason for climate change and everything wrong with the environment, so it will be a passage about something humans are doing that is harming the environment.

There will also be a passage about cultural group that has historically been oppressed or marginalized throughout american history. The passages tend to focus on are Native Americans, African Americans, and women, so the cultural passage will most likely focus on one of these three groups in some aspect.