SAT Reading Strategies Complete Breakdown!

Prepare for SAT Reading is one of the most time-intensive and difficult tasks for high school students looking to improve their chances into getting into top tier universities or great scholarships.

There are plenty of reasons that it is difficult:

1) people just run out of time

2) people are not that great at discerning between close answer choices

3) there’s never any definitive answer or explanation, but rather requirements for intuition, which varies from student to student

4) reading can get frustrating and tiresome, meaning that later passages can become more and more difficult to read.

There’s good news! There are tons of tips/techniques that I have for you to make your reading skills improve dramatically. These are methods that I teach to students that work wonders and help you a lot to improve your score. However I won’t lie, they will require a lot of time and consistency.

First, start reading a LOT more. This means more difficult reading material, and maybe reading things that are outside your comfort zone. The best way that this could work is reading the newspaper. I recommend ordering the newspaper for a few months in paper version, and going through it every morning or every night for 30 minutes. Even though this may seem time consuming – and trust me on this – it will help you so much to improve your reading capabilities.

The reasons are again three fold:

1) you need to start reading at a more advanced level, testing your vocabulary and context clue skills

2) you should start reading more varied literature, and newspapers are a great source for this

3) you should start figuring out how to understand the connections between different passages in what you’re reading, and newspapers have so many points of view in a single article that it will force you to read more deeply and thoroughly

You can get a student digital subscription to New York Times, which is my favorite for reading.

https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/education/student?campaignId=6WYWY

Second, start reading with a “they-say-i-say” mentality.

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393631678

They say I say is a great book on how to read academically by understanding how different points of view flow within a single passage. This is especially useful technique when you are reading through paired passages or scientific passages, but it can also be useful when you’re reading personal/fictional passages. It requires you to notice how many and where in the passage a new argument/point of view is being made, and then make a line underneath that paragraph. This technique will take some time to get used to, but it will help you wonders when you start getting the hang of it.

I save the best tip and technique for third on my list. This is CRITICAL to a great reading score. The best tip for practicing and getting better at analyzing passages is taking several untimed passages. I know that this is contrary to advice – after all, finishing on time is one of the biggest make-it-or-break-it for the SAT reading section. However, you should take an untimed passage. Spend 5-10 minutes reading the passage. After you have read it once, get a pen and paper and next to every paragraph, write a few words to summarize that paragraph. This will require you to understand what each paragraph is saying and how it is phrased. Then write the main idea and the primary purpose of the entire passage. This will require you to understand as a whole what the passage is about. Then you should figure out the relationship between each paragraph and its preceding paragraph. This requires you to understand the function of each paragraph within the argument as a whole.

So one paragraph may “qualify” a claim made by the previous paragraph, whereas another paragraph may add more details/context to the implications made by the last paragraph. Another paragraph may build upon the main idea introduced in the previous paragraph, while another may introduce conflicting/contradicting claims. You should write down all these relationships on the piece of paper. Then you should have a really nice outline of the passage that has summarized all these things.

After you have spent 10 minutes doing this whole process, go through the questions in the SAT passage. However, make sure you put your hand over all the answer choices! This means that you should look at the questions without looking at any of the answer choices. Come up with your best answer in your head, then on your outline write three or four words that summarizes what your answer should be.

If it is asking why the author used a particular sentence, or what the definition of the word is, or what the primary purpose is, you should be able to come up with your own answer. Do this for every single question on the test. Then go through the answer choices, this time comparing them with your own answers. See how close you got to the answer choice they have given. The test makers are real people too, and the goal of this exercise is to see how well you can come up with answers that correspond with theirs.

This will help you immensely to get better at reading and answering questions, and after you’ve down this with sufficient number of passages, you’ll get so much faster at reading passages and deriving the main idea and the primary purpose. You’ll also get so much better at answering questions because you won’t be stuck on deciding between similar answer choices.

The goal of this is two-fold:

first, you should be able to recognize how and why an author made specific argumentative moves to build their argument

second, you should be able to come up with answers that correspond to the correct answer choices.

Trust me – this process will serve you wonders when it comes down to the exam.

Above all, practice doesn’t make perfect – perfect practice makes perfect. Keep working at it, and you’ll become an awesome reader. Have fun with it, and I hope this was helpful!

Naman