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I'm trying to figure out the best way to practice read for the RC section of LSAT?

I have a bunch of The Economists, The New Yorker, and I'm going to print out a bunch of dense scienctific articles.

Should I mark out sections of about 350-500 words and read them as fast as I can while doing my best to retain the information? Write out the main points of each paragraph, take notes of the viewpoints, box, underline key definitions, names, etc..

or do you think it's best to just read as fast as I can working through dense material?

I still don't have my technique down and I haven't been able to quite find a technique that works for me. When I mark up the passage as I go along, it breaks my concentration no matter how little I write in the margins or in the passage, and then I find myself having to reread because I lost my concentration.

No matter what I do I get between 17-19 right

Gotta walk before you can run.

Don't worry about speed -- that'll come naturally. (And you've got months to get there anyway) Worry about comprehension. Don't skim, READ. Use a pen/pencil and underline if you need to. Do the same thing with the New York Times. Like anything else, comprehending dense reading takes practice and patience. It's February, meaning you have months to get to where you need to be.

I'm going to take a guess: you don't read much for fun.

Is that right? If not, I apologize. But if it is, reading -- at all -- will help train your brain to read as well as teaching you about things you're actually interested in.

So try to read something dense you actually LIKE and are interested in, so long as you're doing this. If you like baseball, read "Moneyball." If you like basketball, read Halberstam's "The Breaks of the Game." If you like American history, read "John Adams" or "A People's History of the US" or "Battle Cry of Freedom" or something. Read classics like Dickens and the original Sherlock Holmes stories and Hemingway.

Again, don't skim -- READ.