The Economist for Reading Comp Forum

[uganik]

As I was reading through my stack of "The Economist" to help better prepare me for the Feb LSAT, I came across the following paragraph in the January 16th, 2010 edition:

Some reckon its failure to unearth masses of new information is down to a mix of
mendacious reticence on the part of key witnesses and the pusillanimity of their inquisitors.
A kinder interpretation may be that, even for the loquacious Mr Campbell, there is not much left to say.

Frankly, I thought this was quite a bit to say.....

And a good vocabulary stretch for the day as well.

Good Luck to all!!!

[traehekat]

Haha whoever wrote that is an asshole.

[uganik]

I tend to agree!

He was obviously trying to impress us with his verbosity.

[Lurkster]

One fun thing about the economist is that the articles are often ended with a smug sort of quip.

I'm not sure it really helps too much with reading comp, but a lot of people think it's the best supplementary reading a person can do for this test. I think Scientific American has been mentioned as a good source for this purpose as well.

[Derrex]

I think looking back on it, Economist is probably not a good way to prep for RC. One is that their writing is unusually uniform (I heard they are predominantly from Oxford) and two is that their articles don't really invoke critical thinking. They provide a lot of opinions, but those opinions are rarely well reasoned out and often at a whim. The arguments they make tend to be the same and very predictable and at some point, you read the same arguments over and over again and stop thinking.

I find articles in Scientific American to be better because its written by various authors from different view points arguing for different things. I'm sure the same could be made for other scholarly magazines. The arguments, structure, and content is better thought out and more reasonably sound because it has to be for it to be published in the first place. The thing about a news magazine like the economist is that its churned out every week by the same writers with most likely little peer review. Its arguments are applied and reapplied week after week on the almost the same topics. It has to be because that how you get 100 pages of stuff every 7 days. Its good if you just want to get back in the mode of reading, but probably not ideal for LSAT RC which does require critical thinking and analysis simply not found in a weekly news magazine.

[thisguy456]

Check out Stanley Fish's blog on NYTimes.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ca ... nley-fish/

He often uses an academic-style prose, dissects topical arguments or debates, and best of all they're free.

Read them like you'd read an RC passage (quickly and always questioning). I read these while studying for the LSAT. Not sure if it helped, but thought it was better than The Economist.