​​5 Ways to Improve Your Law School Reading & Comprehension Skills

• Actively practice reading
• Take useful notes
• Plan your reading strategy
• Build the right atmosphere
• Revise before the class

Law school is hard, and not having great reading comprehension skills makes it even harder. Fortunately for you, regularly practicing just these five things can drastically improve your reading ability.

In this article, we will tell you why you need great reading and comprehension skills in law school. We will also give you five easy tips on how to improve your reading ability and elaborate on these tips.

With our help, you will ace your law exams!

Why do law students need excellent reading & comprehension skills?

Law school requires intensive academic reading of over 30 pages per class. Students need to be able to swiftly grasp and retain dense, academic text. There is technical jargon, case studies, and high-grade vocabulary.

Having the right reading & comprehension skills is not only desirable but essential for law school. While 30 pages may not sound like much at first, students quickly realize that it is not just 30 pages of reading.

Text for law school reading often contains words that many people are not familiar with. You need to look these words up and make sense of them. This takes a significant amount of time.

Sometimes the text contains case studies that you will need to go through. These can be rather long.

The text can also contain references that need to be followed to understand their use in the given context.

Even if you are able to quickly read and understand the text, you need to retain the information as well. This requires you to train your memory as well. There are many different online resources that can help you with that.

As a result, when all of this comes together, it becomes overwhelming. People quickly realize that their reading ability needs to be drastically improved to help them keep up with law school.

With our comprehensive guide, we will tell you how you can quickly get ahead in law school by following five easy tips!

1. Actively practice reading

Read with the determination to thoroughly understand and critically evaluate the text. Find links in the text that connect it to your needs – determine its relevance to you.

Active reading helps you identify and understand your needs. When you go through the text, you will be looking for exactly what you need. As a result, it will become easier to find instead of feeling like a needle in a haystack.

This is the most important tip. If you want to improve your reading skills, you need to read A LOT. Practice active reading instead of passive reading and re-reading (which is not effective for law school).

A great tip for this is to try and read quickly. Just go through the text as quickly as you can while understanding every word. This will help you actively engage with the text and not let your mind wander off.

There are some great tools that can help you boost the speed of your reading ability. This can help you make the most out of your active reading skills.

2. Take useful notes

Taking notes along the way helps you dissect the text. You can pick it apart piece by piece. This makes understanding the text easier by looking at individual ‘pieces’ instead of the text as a whole.

The length, information-dense texts that often accompany law school are tricky to read for one common reason: they are humongous. When we read such long texts, the information at the start of the text tends to drift off.

As a result, we are not able to connect the information at the start with what we are reading towards the end. This prevents us from being able to see patterns and form meaningful links in the text.

Taking notes is in itself a skill, and people often don’t realize that. They tend to take unnecessary notes, thus creating a lot of clutter. This makes it harder for them to actually make sense of what they have written down.

Instead, try making notes of pivotal details. These could include facts about the suspect’s location, for instance.

When re-reading the article, read the notes as a whole with it. This will help you get a holistic understanding of the text. Thus, it will improve your comprehension abilities.

3. Plan your reading strategy

Knowing exactly what you are looking for makes reading easier. You identify keywords that point you towards the answer you need.

Instead of a brute force approach, targeted reading saves both time and energy.

When you don’t know what you are looking for, you read the text for the sake of familiarizing yourself with it. This way, you could miss out on important details in the text.

Instead, try to approach the text strategically. Ask yourself: why are you reading this text? What kind of words could help you find the exact thing you are looking for?

What helps, even more, is if you try to come up with possible exam questions yourself. This way, with those questions in mind, you can read the text in a bid to find their answers.

This will not only be a great exercise for you to practice for your exams but also help your comprehension skills.

4. Build the right atmosphere

Remove any distractions from your environment. Do this in order to make your focus as laser-sharp as you can.

Making yourself cozy can put you in a more focused state that will enhance your reading. While it may seem like only an aesthetic, it is very effective.

When we are reading, little distractions like different noises can often interrupt us. When our focus breaks, we tend to forget what we read earlier. When we resume reading and reach the end, we can’t make sense of it.

Therefore, it helps to remove distractions from your environment and make yourself comfortable. An easy way to do that is to find the best location in your house and put on your favorite music.

The location could be anything. It could be a window sill, a balcony, your bed, your study desk, or the kitchen table. Anything that helps you feel relaxed and in the mood to work.

As for the music, now this isn’t necessary, but it helps drown out loud unpleasant noises.

When you read while listening to the same tune, you know what notes to expect. As a result, it’s not a distraction. Instead, in some way, your mind tunes it out.

If you need suggestions on what kind of music you could play, try something like white noises. Our bodies are already accustomed to ignoring these sounds. Therefore, when you play them while reading, it will make the whole experience very immersive.

If that’s not your speed, you could, of course, listen to some of Hans Zimmer’s best works from Interstellar and Gladiator.

5. Revise before the class

Ensuring you remember all the key points really helps you perform well in class. Since we can’t remember everything all the time, a quick revision session is great!

Try to go through your notes to make the most out of your revisions. Thoroughly going through them will give you a holistic understanding of the article.

Your notes have already dissected the entire article into its most critical bits – separating the wheat from the chaff. Once you are done with your notes, just skimming through the text will bring back all the things right away.

This will save both time and energy.

Revision is a huge step in improving your reading comprehension abilities. Unlike re-reading to find answers, when revising, you already know the answers.

You already know the meanings of all the technical jargon and understand the article’s different pivotal aspects. When revising it with such hindsight, you are able to identify how different words and phrases are used in context.

Not only would this help in improving your reading ability but also your writing style. 

Conclusion

While law school reading may seem daunting, there are tips to make it easier and more manageable.

Nothing will enhance your reading skills like reading regularly would. However, when we talk about reading regularly, we are not talking about reading Harry Potter novels. Instead, read things that will provide you with a similar text format as law school.

Try reading the textbooks assigned by your syllabus, journals, legal news, agreements, court judgments, and case studies.

Make sure that when you are reading things, you read them with a strategy. Know what you want to get out of reading the text. Use a targeted approach to reading so that you always know what you are looking for.

Dissect the important parts of the article using different notes you make along the way. This will help you get a holistic understanding of the most significant parts of the article.

Reading requires a lot of focus. Setting up a cozy, comfy mood free of distractions is also essential and can help you achieve your maximum focus.

Lastly, don’t forget to revise your notes and skim through the text right before the class. This will help you stay on top of law school by giving you the edge you need!

While these tips are very helpful, there are many websites that can help you improve your reading abilities. One of these websites is Iris Reading.

Iris Reading offers many great tools that can help you boost your productivity and memory – two essential things needed to succeed at law school

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to Iris reading right now and get the GPA of your dreams this semester!