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LSAT RC passage structure is what the questions actually test, so read for it and take almost no notes. Tag each paragraph with the verb describing what it does, mark every shift into someone else's viewpoint, and state the author's position in one sentence before you start answering.
Take almost none. The useful amount is a handful of words per paragraph and one sentence at the end, and anything more is transcription that costs you the time the questions need.
The reason is not that notes are bad. It is that most RC note-taking records content, and RC questions overwhelmingly test structure: what each paragraph is doing, whose view is being described, and where the author stands.
Content is on the page and you can go back for it. Structure is not, and you cannot.
So the note that earns its time is a verb, not a fact. Paragraph two: raises objection.
Paragraph three: concedes, then narrows. Six words that tell you where to look for the answer to nearly any question.
Four moves, in order. Together they take about three and a half minutes on a standard passage and leave you answering questions from a map rather than from memory.
MoveWhat you are doingWhat you write down1. Find the topic in the first two sentencesName the subject in three words, without detailNothing, or three words2. Tag each paragraph with a verbDecide what the paragraph does, not what it saysOne verb per paragraph3. Mark every voice shiftNote where a view belongs to somebody other than the authorA bracket and initials4. State the author's position in one sentenceSay what the author thinks and how stronglyOne sentence at the end
A paragraph that says a great deal about eighteenth-century canal financing may be doing one simple job: setting up a problem the rest of the passage solves. If your note says canal financing, you will reread it when a question comes. If your note says sets up problem, you will not.
The verbs recur across passages. Introduces, complicates, objects, concedes, qualifies, resolves, illustrates, contrasts. Most passages are built from six or seven of them in a familiar order.
That recurrence is the payoff. After forty passages you are not reading unfamiliar material, you are recognizing a shape you have seen before with new nouns in it.
Here is a paragraph written for this example, in the register the test uses: Proponents of the revised statute maintain that its notice requirements protect small landholders who would otherwise learn of an easement only after construction had begun. Yet the statute exempts utilities from those requirements, and utilities account for the substantial majority of easements granted in rural counties. The protection, in practice, reaches the minority of cases in which it is least needed.
Content note, the unhelpful kind: statute, notice requirements, landholders, utilities exempt, rural counties.
Structure note, the useful kind: states proponents' claim, then undercuts it with an exemption. Author skeptical. That note answers a main point question, an author attitude question and a role question without rereading a word.
Slow down on the first paragraph and the last, and speed up in the middle. The first paragraph almost always contains the topic and often the tension the passage exists to address. The last usually contains the author's position.
In the middle, resist the urge to understand every sentence. A dense technical paragraph still has a job, and you can usually name the job from its first and last sentences even when the interior is opaque.
If you finish a paragraph and cannot name its verb, read only its first and last sentences again and name the verb from those. Do not read the whole paragraph a second time; that is the decision that costs people a question elsewhere in the section.
Reading speed is not what separates scores in this section, and chasing it usually costs accuracy without buying much time. The structural read is faster because it decides what to skip, not because the eyes move quicker.
There is also a general lesson from the learning research worth applying here. Students systematically misjudge which study methods are working: in Deslauriers and colleagues (2019), PNAS (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116), active-learning students rated their own learning 0.56 standard deviations lower while scoring 0.46 standard deviations higher than lecture students. The method that feels worse was the one that worked.
Structural reading feels worse at first, because you finish a passage knowing fewer facts than a careful reader does. Then you answer the questions faster and more accurately, which is the only measure that pays.
Every LSAC figure on this page was taken from LSAC's own pages and last checked on July 26, 2026. Prices, dates and policies move without notice, so the source link sits next to each number rather than in a bibliography at the bottom.
Where LSAC has not published something, this page says so in those words rather than filling the hole with a plausible number. That is the difference between a gap and a guess, and only one of them is safe to plan around.
Very few. One verb per paragraph, a bracket where a voice shifts, and one sentence on the author's position. Transcribing content duplicates a page you can simply look back at.
Name the topic in three words, tag each paragraph with the verb describing what it does, mark every shift into someone else's viewpoint, then state the author's position in one sentence.
Roughly three to four minutes on a standard passage, leaving four to five for the questions. If you are reading faster than that and rereading during questions, the read was not doing its job.
Generally no. Question-first reading turns a structural task into a scavenger hunt and tends to cost more on main point and author attitude questions than it saves on detail questions.
That is often fine and sometimes correct. If you can say what each paragraph did and where the author stands, you have what the questions need; the details stay on the page for you to retrieve.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
August 5, 2026
August 5, 2026