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Thousands of test takers make the mistake of trying to understand every
bit of the text in a passage. Terrified of "missing something," they doggedly
slog their way through, hanging on every word and every thought, as if
every sentence were of equal importance.
Critical reading demands the opposite strategy. When you read
critically, you have to see that some sentences are really important (because
they present or announce major themes or ideas), while some are secondary
(because they present evidence for larger points) and some are downright
filler.
There's no time on a standardized test to read a passage in depth.
That's deliberate: The testmakers want the best scores to go to people
who can quickly distill a lengthy, difficult passage down to its most
important ideas. (Those are the people who will probably best handle the
demands of grad school.)
We call this distillation process, "getting the gist of a passage."
It involves reading for what the author is PRIMARILY trying to say or
communicate, and putting that into your own words. It means transforming
deadly text into living ideas.
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