Navigating Painful Reading Passages

Welcome to Part 2 of our series on conquering test anxiety. If you haven’t read Part 1 you can check it out here. It’s filled with tips to help you neutralize SAT panic before and during the test. One of the best ways to prevent test anxiety is through preparation – know what you’re up against on the test and have a set of strategies to tackle the material. Today’s post is about ways to navigate those frustratingly dense reading passages.

I’ve worked with plenty of students who know that they’re supposed to go back to the passage to find the answer to a reading question, but that advice only goes so far if they have trouble understanding what they’ve just read. Some of those SAT passages are so complex it seems as though they were written in another language. So what’s a test taker to do? Freak out, throw down your pencil, and run out of the room screaming? Nope. You’re going to break down the text into smaller, manageable pieces (and refrain throwing objects.)

Play to Your Strengths

Although vocabulary is no longer “officially” tested on the SAT, you’ll still see some very challenging words in these passages. Many students get so overwhelmed by the words they don’t know that they completely miss the parts they do understand. Take a look at the following excerpt from Charlotte Brontë’s, The Professor:

Antipathy is the only word which can express the feeling Edward Crimsworth had for me—a feeling, in a great measure, involuntary, and which was liable to be excited by every, the most trifling movement, look, or word of mine. My southern accent annoyed him; the degree of education evinced in my language irritated him; my punctuality, industry, and accuracy, fixed his dislike, and gave it the high flavour and poignant relish of envy; he feared that I too should one day make a successful tradesman. Had I been in anything inferior to him, he would not have hated me so thoroughly, but I knew all that he knew, and, what was worse, he suspected that I kept the padlock of silence on mental wealth in which he was no sharer.

It’s not uncommon that when I ask a student to describe how Edward Crimsworth views the narrator the student responds, “He feels antipathy,” without knowing what the word means. It’s great that this student found the spot that described Crimsworth’s feelings, but if he doesn’t know what “antipathy” means he’s not going to able to answer a question about Crimsworth’s feelings. Instead of focusing on less familiar words such as “antipathy,” “trifling,” “evinced,” and “poignant” look for words that you do know. In that same part of the passage we see the words “annoyed,” “irritated,” “dislike,” “envy,” and “hated”. We have more than enough evidence that shows us how Crimsworth feels (and I’d say he’s feeling pretty hostile.) We don’t need the earlier, unfamiliar words, and we certainly don’t need to tackle the phrase “kept the padlock of silence on mental wealth.” You know more than you think you do! Play to your strengths, not your weaknesses.

Pronouns are Your Friends

You may think that pronouns only matter on the Writing & Language portion of the Verbal section, but pronouns are actually incredibly important on the Reading portion as well. Keep an eye out for pronouns such as “this,” “these,” “those,” and “that.” If you see these words at the start of a paragraph it’s a sign that you need to read at least part of the preceding paragraph as well in order to fully understand that part of the passage. Tracking pronouns within paragraphs can also help you tease out the meaning of more complex parts of the passage. If you’re having trouble deciphering what one part of the passage is saying find out what the pronoun is referring to and see if that part of the passage is a bit clearer.

In Conclusion…

Transition words and phrases can be very helpful when you’re trying to make sense of difficult passages. Sentences that start with the phrases “for example,” “in other words,” or “in conclusion” are like gifts. If you have trouble understanding earlier information in the paragraph, these phrases announce that the author is going to describe the same thing she just wrote but in a different way. In other words, you get a second chance to tackle that part of the passage.

Standardized tests are all about patterns. In the Reading section you’ll see passages constructed in the same ways again and again. You can use the reading tools you already have to navigate these annoying passages once you know how to apply them to this context. While it won’t necessarily make the SAT less annoying, it can definitely make it less intimidating. Check back next week for more test-taking strategies!