Reading Techniques for GRE Reading comprehension
Below are some fantastic reading techniques that we, and our students have used while studying for the GRE. These techniques are quite advanced in nature, and it takes several days to a few weeks for your brain to adjust to the new reading speeds. Also, these techniques require great amounts of practice and persistence from your end, so if you think you cannot put in a lot of effort in the coming few weeks, or if you don’t have that much time before the test, try implementing at least one or two of the given techniques. Ideally, these tips are for those students who are targeting 165+ on the Verbal section. But, even otherwise, if you have lots of time left before your test begins, you should try and implement them all, and practice as much as you can.
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| Reading Techniques for GRE Reading Comprehension |
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1. Chunk Reading
Chunk Reading is perhaps one of the most significant techniques used by advanced readers to gather as much information as they can in a very limited time. The technique is rather simple and straightforward: Read multiple words at a time. Normally, you read each word separately and as you move along, you understand the meaning of the sentence. But, this process takes time.
Instead, you should read chunks of words at a single instance, and complete every sentence in a maximum of two or three instances. For example, take the sentence: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Usually, you would read it as “The quick|brown|fox|jumped|over|the lazy|dog”. But, when you use the chunk reading technique, you read it as “The quick brown fox|jumped over the lazy dog”. There shouldn’t be any gap between reading each word. More advanced readers read this entire sentence in one single instance, thus, reducing reading time drastically.
So, the next time you see a piece of text, read the sentences in chunks and see how much time you are saving per paragraph. In a time limited environment such as the GRE, this technique will save you at least 2 seconds per 10 words. Which means, for an average Reading Comprehension passage that has 350 words, you will save 70 seconds of time.
2. Don’t Vocalize the Text
When you are reading this sentence, there is an inner voice inside you that is reading it out, and only you can hear it. This is called vocalizing, and it is a process the brain implements in order to completely understand what you are reading. Brilliant, but there is one problem with this: it takes lots of time. You must have already heard the fact that you can only read as fast as you can speak. This is because, we have been trained to do so, since childhood: to read aloud. And our brains have been hardwired to read only as fast as we can speak, albeit, not as fast as we would like.
When you read aloud, it takes time for the information seen by your eyes to reach the brain, which converts the visual text into sound, which you can hear as your inner voice, and then the brain again decodes information through this inner voice. This is quite a roundabout process. But it has been observed, however, that when you are reading at a superfast pace, the brain cannot vocalize the text. This is the reason why the average human tends to read at a comfortable pace; in order to avoid not understanding. It is a natural response, not your fault.
But you are not the average human, you are a GRE test taker. You cannot afford to read at a comfortable pace, since time is always pricking you from behind. So what do you do? You stop vocalizing the text you are reading. Now, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, since you are going against the nature of your brain. It takes at least two weeks for you to fully take control of your brain. But meanwhile, you can use one tactic that works really well.
You should manually murmur a monotonous sound, slightly aloud, so that your brain can no more use your inner voice to vocalize text. The brain cannot do more than one task at a time. So, if you give your brain something else to follow, it cannot deploy its vocalizing power. Try doing this as you read any text material: Make a monotonous sound such as “Mmmmmm” or “Eeeeeeeee” or any other repetitive sound throughout the time you read the text. At first it seems rather difficult to understand what you are reading, but within a few days, you will see that you are not only understanding what you read, but you have also increased your reading speed.
You can use this technique in the exam too, but make sure you are not making those sounds loud enough to disturb others. Else, you will have to face the proctor’s anger.
3. Ignore Useless Words
Wait, what? The GRE has useless words too? Not exactly. But every sentence in English has about 40% useless words. Useless in the sense, there is no point in using that word in the sentence, and one can easily understand the meaning of the sentence even if you remove the words entirely. Words like articles (A, an, the), tenses like ‘is, are’ etc., are not exactly vital to understand a sentence, in the context of a GRE passage. They are only used as ornaments to make the sentence sound grammatically correct.
Now, there is no point in reading all these auxiliary words, and since 40% of the passage consist of such words, you will be saving at least 40% of the time. Let us see an example, so you will understand it even better. This excerpt is about the GRE, taken from Wikipedia:
“The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) is a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for most graduate schools in the United States. Created and administered by Educational Testing Service (ETS) in 1949, the exam aims to measure verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing, and critical thinking skills that have been acquired over a long period of time and that are not related to any specific field of study. The GRE General Test is offered as a computer-based exam administered at Prometric testing centers.”
Now the above paragraph takes about 20-25 seconds for the average reader to finish. And there are several unnecessary words in there. The test makers purposefully include them, so they can waste your valuable time. But, we are even smarter. We omit all those useless words from the paragraph, and rephrase it as:
GRE – admissions requirement – graduate schools US. Created by ETS 1949 – measure verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing, and critical thinking skills. GRE – offered as computer-based exam – at Prometric centers.
The above sentence takes less than 10 seconds to read and understand. Do you see the difference? This shows how much time you can save if you omit unnecessary words from the passage. Now it is easy to do it when you omit it manually. But in the exam, you cannot simple delete those words. The words will be there, and you have to omit them in your mind. This isn’t easy, but it can be done with practice, and it takes a couple of weeks at least for an average reader to read a sentence, and naturally omit the auxiliary words.
4. Avoid Rereading
This is one of the blunders students make while reading passages on Reading Comprehension. They read a particular sentence, but at the end of it, they aren’t too confident to move on. So, what do they do? They go back and read it again to get more clarity. Now, this is okay if you do it once, maybe twice. But once you begin to do this, you keep on stopping and going back to read things again and again. This wastes lots of time, without you actually noticing it. You think it is okay because you are understand it properly, but in reality, it isn’t okay at all.
This situation arises mainly due to lack of confidence. If you are confident about yourself, you will be content with a single reading, and will not think of rereading stuff you have just read. Also, it might be because you are super tensed, that you totally forgot what you read a few seconds ago. Both situations are quite dangerous, and you should try your best to avoid them.
How can you do that? Well, to paraphrase YOLO, the quintessential juvenile acronym of the twenty first century, remember YORO, or You Only Read Once. That’s how you do it. Make it a point to not reread any sentence. If you think a particular sentence has lots of terminology in it and it is impossible to understand it in one go, try reducing your reading speed only for that one sentence. But, never ever go back.
This makes you conscious about your reading, and you will read every word with 100% concentration. Hence, you won’t have to waste time going back. But, even after all this you think you will have to go back, do it when a relevant questions pops up after the passage. If there is not even one question related to that sentence, why bother reading it again? So, if you see a question to which you are not sure of the answer, then you can go back and read that part again.
5. Train Hard
Whenever you have free time, practice reading some of the hardest passages there are. Try searching online for advanced scientific research papers, or go to the library and read books about science, sociology, philosophy, etc. And don’t read them for knowledge or for pleasure. Read them to improve your reading speed. Reading tough subject matters and articles with great speed improves your comprehension skills, and cognitive abilities. If you are able to understand complex theories even when you read at a great speed, it means that you will do a great job on the actual test.
Just like the other techniques we have discussed, this isn’t very easy, but you can do it with lots of practice. Your brain slowly gets hardwired to understanding complex words and sentences even when you read fast. This helps you a lot, because one: in the test, you won’t find passages that hard, which makes things even easier for you, and two: you will be ready to read and understand any passage you are given, irrespective of the topic.
6. Never Read Modifiers
Most modifiers are believed to be useful phrases that give more information about the subject, in a sentence. But on the GRE, this more information is not required much, and on top of that, reading more information means taking more time to finish the passage. Which is exactly what we are trying to avoid here. Take a look at this example:
“Adolf Hitler, who is widely regarded as a symbol of violence and killing, is actually a loving father to his children.”
The phrase “who is widely regarded as a symbol of violence and killing” is a modifier here. It gives more information about the subject, which is Adolf Hitler in this case. Now there is no need to read this modifier, since it gives no new information to us. Everyone knows that Hitler is widely regarded as a symbol of violence and killing. And since this is just additional information, the GRE will not ask you a question on it. And hence, there is no point in reading it. By simply skipping it off, you are saving yourself a few seconds of time. And the sentence “Adolf Hitler is actually a loving father to his children” makes perfect sense, and you can move on to the next sentence.
A typical Reading Comprehension passage on the GRE has about two or three modifiers, and if you make it a point to skip them all, you are doing yourself a favor. And if at all, in a highly unlikely situation, you see a question about that extra information in the modifier, you can always go back and read it.
7. Make A Visual Movie
You must have heard that most people are visual learners. What this means is, most of us learn things by either seeing them, or visualizing them happen. And visualizing things while reading isn’t new to us either. Remember the scenes your mind creates whenever you read a novel? Be it a crime scene, a romantic dialogue, or an extraterrestrial invasion, we tend to create little movies inside our heads as we read the stories from books.
This is a great talent that we humans have, and you will have to tap into this resource if you want to understand passages thoroughly. Make small visual movies inside your head as you start reading the passage. Every passage has a hero and a villain. It has a scenario, and a small plot. Use these attributes, weave together a nice visual story, and play it inside your brain while reading text from the screen. This is a great way of remembering things, and you will certainly not have to come back to read again, since the images are already stored in your brain in a sequence.
So, as soon as you see a question, your answer will come to you in the form of a vivid scene from the movie you created, and you can answer it with ease. This again, comes with practice, so use your free time effectively, and implement these neat little tricks at home.
8. Use a Pointing Device
Another fantastic way to improve your reading speed by leaps and bounds, is by using a pointing device. Anything from your index finger to a pencil can work as a pointing device. Since the text is on the screen, and the screen is at a distance from your eyes, it can be difficult to fix your eyes on the words for a long time. This is why you should use the pencil or your finger as a pointing device. This device tells your eyes that they should be following wherever it goes, and the faster you move the device, the faster your eyes will scan through the words. And the process we discussed under ‘Chunk Reading’ comes into play.
Research shows that people who use a pencil or a pen as a pointing device while reading, tend to improve their reading speeds by close to 50%, and still understand the entire stuff. This is because, your eyes will follow the pencil, and your brain will only focus on the words that the pencil goes through, and it doesn’t bother about the rest of the world. This increases concentration levels, along with reading speed. Try this technique the next time you read something. Our primary school teachers weren’t wrong after all when they asked us to do the same.
9. Vertical Reading
This is probably the hardest of all speed reading techniques. As the name suggests, you should be reading text vertically. Which means, not word by word, but line by line at a time. Your eyeball should move downwards, instead of sideways. It is similar to chunk reading, but here, the chunk is an entire line of text. This is quite an uphill task for a beginner, and only the fastest readers in the world can do it, but you should try and get as close to it as possible.
A good way to start is, by reading newspapers and magazines. In particular, newspapers have narrow columns of text, and each line has around 5-7 words. This is quite an easy task for a beginner, and you should target reading a news item vertically downwards. Magazines are similar to newspapers, and if you can try and get scientific magazines, that’d be great.
Remember, this might seem next to impossible in the beginning, but you are only trying to get better. You may not be able to read long sentences in one second, but even if you can read one short sentence per second, you will skyrocket your reading speed.
10. Track Your WPM
WPM is Words Per Minute. Whenever you are reading – anything from a news article to a fiction novel – always have the timer with you. Almost all smartphones have a stopwatch application preinstalled, and you should put that to good use. Start the timer, and then start reading. At the end of 5 minutes, check how many words you could read per minute. Or, you can use online tools to track your WPM count.
Spreeder is an awesome resource when it comes to keeping track of your WPM. You can copy paste the text you want to read, set the reading speed, and also how many words in a chunk you would want to read. It is an ideal tool for GRE aspirants who are looking to destroy Reading Comprehension. You should definitely check it out.
The average reader’s WPM is around 250, but advanced readers can go up to 1000. But, since you aren’t planning to be the world’s fastest reader, you should ideally set a target of 500 WPM. This means you can read the average Reading Comprehension passage in about 40-60 seconds! Imagine the cushion you will have if you can finish off reading and understanding a passage within 60 seconds. Normally, you should set aside at least 5-6 minutes per passage (including reading and answering questions.) So if you can finish reading in 1 minute, you will have 4-5 minutes to answer 3-5 questions, which will be a cakewalk, seriously.
11. Use Blocking Devices
Whenever you see a long passage, you get a minor heart attack. You keep thinking that if you cannot answer all the questions at the end of the passage, it is going to be a complete waste of time. This worry creeps in at the last moment, and spoils your mood. This has happened quite often with our students, and we give them a simple solution. Concentrate only on the sentence you are currently reading, and use something to block off the remaining text. It can be anything: your palm, or the scratch paper you have, or anything.
Just try to block the text and make sure you can see only one line of text at a time. This will give you a feeling of ‘there is only one more line to go’, and you will finish off the entire passage sooner than you think.
Conclusion
So, that’s about it. We have come to an end of this epic journey called the Destruction of Reading Comprehension. We have discussed about 38 invaluable strategies that you could use to improve not only your reading speed, but also your scores on the reading comprehension section.
This is by far the most comprehensive guide in the world, to help you ace the Reading Comprehension section in the GRE. If you think this is very helpful, or if you really loved it, share it with your friends right now! Our goal is to help as many students as we can. So what are you waiting for? Go share the living daylights out of this guide!
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