Paraphrase EVERY Sentence
You are three sentences into a Reading Comprehension passage. You hit the end of sentence three and realize you have no idea what sentence two said. So your eyes slide back up. You reread it. Then you reread sentence one, just to be safe. Then you start sentence three again.
You probably didn't even notice you did it. Almost nobody does.
I'll bet you reread MORE than you think. Not a little more. A LOT more. And I'll bet that rereading is a big reason Verbal feels rushed.
The reread you never count
Here is the math, and you should do it yourself on paper. On the current GRE, Verbal is two sections: 12 questions in 18 minutes, then 15 questions in 23 minutes. That's 27 questions in 41 minutes total, per the official Verbal section page.
Say you lose just 10 seconds per question to rereading. That's 27 × 10 = 270 seconds. That's 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Out of 41. More than a tenth of your Verbal time, gone, spent reading words you already read.
Now be honest. Is 10 seconds per question really your number? On a dense passage, it's probably closer to 30.
Stop reading and think about this for a second: WHY do you reread? Not "because it was hard." Be specific. The real reason is simple. Your eyes moved over the words, but your brain never checked whether it understood them. You didn't read the sentence. You looked at it.
The habit: paraphrase EVERY sentence
Here is the fix. After every sentence, stop. Say what it just said in your own plain words, in about five words. Write a short note. Then, and only then, move to the next sentence.
Every sentence. Not the hard ones. EVERY one.
Yes, it's slow. Yes, it's annoying. The first week you do it, you'll feel like you're reading through mud. You have to decide what you want MORE though: to FEEL fast while you read, or to actually finish the section with the right answers.
Here's why it works. When you paraphrase, you catch confusion the moment it starts, at the sentence where it happens. If you can't put a sentence in your own words, you know right away, and you fix it right there, once. Without the habit, you find out you're lost at the end of the passage, and then you have to reread the whole thing to find where you got lost.
Paraphrasing feels slower per sentence. It's faster per passage. That's the trade.
What a good paraphrase looks like
A good paraphrase is short, plain and in YOUR words. If you copy the passage's words, you haven't tested anything. Here are two GRE style sentences and the notes you'd write:
| The sentence | Your note |
|---|---|
| Although the theory was initially dismissed as speculative, subsequent findings have rendered its critics' objections increasingly difficult to sustain. | Theory first mocked. Critics now losing. |
| The museum's decision to display the replica, rather than the fragile original, was less a concession to safety than an acknowledgment that visitors rarely notice the difference. | Shows copy mostly because nobody can tell. |
Notice what the second note does. The sentence offers two reasons, and the note keeps only the one the author actually believes. That "less X than Y" structure flips the weight to Y. If you'd read that sentence fast, you'd probably remember "safety," which is the WRONG reason. Small words like "although," "rather than" and "less than" carry the meaning, which is exactly why signal words tell you the answer before you see the choices.
This isn't just for passages. On Text Completion (a sentence or short paragraph with one to three blanks you fill from word lists) and Sentence Equivalence (one blank, and you pick the TWO words that give the sentence the same meaning), paraphrase the sentence before you look at a single choice. Put your own word in the blank. Then go find it.
Watch it work
Look at how little work Step 3 took once Steps 1 and 2 were done. You weren't comparing five choices to a passage you half remembered. You were comparing five choices to one line YOU wrote. Wrong choices like (A), (D) and (E) aren't random, either. Wrong answer choices follow patterns, and a clean paraphrase makes those patterns obvious.
The mistakes I see people make with this habit
- Paraphrasing only the "hard" sentences. You decide a sentence is easy, skip the note, and that's the sentence with the turn in it. INSTEAD: paraphrase every sentence, including the easy ones. The easy ones take two seconds, and the habit only becomes automatic if it has no exceptions.
- Paraphrasing with the passage's own words. Copying "subsequent findings have rendered" into your notes isn't a paraphrase. It's handwriting. INSTEAD: use plain words a kid would use. If you can't, that's the signal you don't understand the sentence yet, and NOW is the time to fix it.
- Doing it in your head. "I'll just paraphrase mentally." That's pride talking, and pride is a ceiling. A mental note is gone by the time you hit the question. INSTEAD: write it down. Three to five words. Short notes are fast notes.
- Dropping the habit when the clock gets tight. Time pressure is exactly when you'll want to skip it, and exactly when rereading costs you the most. Your pacing "problem" is a symptom. The rereading is the disease. INSTEAD: train the habit on untimed practice until it's quick, then add the clock. It gets faster with reps. It always does.
- Reading the choices before you have your own answer. The choices are written to sound right. If you don't have a prediction, they'll pick for you. INSTEAD: read your notes, predict, THEN look at the choices and hunt for your prediction.
If this feels familiar, it should. Breaking an argument into its pieces, sentence by sentence, is the same skill the old essay trained, which is why the Argument essay is gone but its skills are NOT. That skill still runs through the whole Verbal section.
Do this today
Pick ONE Reading Comprehension passage you've already done. Read it the way you normally do, and every time your eyes jump back to a line you already read, make a tick mark on your paper. Don't cheat. Count the ticks.
Then take a fresh passage and paraphrase every sentence, in writing, before you touch the question. Time both.
Look at that tick count. Then tell me you don't reread.
