The method that frees you from backtracking, panic-rereading, and “I lost the thread.”

Most LSAT students read the passage, start the questions, and immediately find themselves flipping back — sometimes sentence by sentence — trying to relocate information.

Top scorers almost never reread.

Not because they have photographic memories, but because they use a one-pass system designed to lock in only the information that actually matters.

This is the full breakdown of that system — the same “zero-reread” approach Kingston students practice nightly until it becomes automatic.

STEP 1: Before Reading, Identify the Passage’s Skeleton

(You’ve already learned this in the previous drill — structure prediction.)

Before you read the passage deeply, know:

What job each paragraph probably plays
Where the author will express their view
Where contrasts or shifts are likely to hit
Where supporting detail is likely to cluster

This pre-frame means you enter the passage with expectations instead of confusion.
Rereading usually comes from confusion.

Structure prediction eliminates that.

STEP 2: Read for Jobs, Not Facts

The biggest misunderstanding in RC prep is this:

You don’t need to remember most facts.
You only need to remember where those facts live.

So during your first (and only!) pass, your goal is:

✔ Understand what each paragraph is doing

—not—

✘ Try to memorize every detail inside it

Label paragraphs mentally in real time:

“setting the issue”
“background”
“presenting View A”
“introducing competing theory”
“author’s solution”
“complication/exception”

This gives you a navigational map.
A mental table of contents.

When a question asks about a detail, you won’t reread the whole passage — you’ll go straight to the one paragraph that does that job.

STEP 3: Mark Only Three Things (No More)

To stay in one-pass mode, you mark only the features the LSAT asks about over and over:

1. Author’s attitude / opinion

Underline tone words:
“fortunately,” “problematic,” “compelling,” “innovative.”

Author attitude drives:

Main Point
Primary Purpose
Author’s View
Inference

2. Contrast markers

Circle “however,” “in contrast,” “but,” “yet.”

Contrasts are where arguments pivot — and where most questions point.

3. Proper nouns or technical terms

Just enough to quickly find them again.
You are not underlining entire sentences — only the anchor words.

These three markings give you a high-resolution search function without rereading entire chunks.

STEP 4: Build Paragraph Summaries That Are Only 3–6 Words Long

During reading, after every paragraph, do a micro-recap in your head:

“P1: debate + positions”
“P2: old theory”
“P3: new critique”
“P4: author’s fix”

“P1: fossil trend overview”
“P2: cause explanation”
“P3: exceptions complicate”

This is the fuel of a one-pass strategy.
If you know each paragraph’s job, you always know exactly where to look later.

Students who reread do so because they never built this skeleton.

STEP 5: Do Not Chase Details While Reading

When you hit dense detail, your brain will try to “decode” everything.

Don’t.

Say to yourself:

“This paragraph is doing background/contrast/mechanism — I don’t need the details right now.”

You’re not memorizing science.
You’re locating functional zones of the passage.

Details matter only when retrieved through questions.

STEP 6: Do Questions in Logical Order (Critical!)

A zero-reread strategy only works if you avoid “detail-first” questions.

Here’s the correct sequence:

1. Main Point

You just read the whole passage — get this while it’s fresh.

2. Author Attitude / Primary Purpose

Same reason — these are global questions.

3. Paragraph Function

Your structure map will make these automatic.

4. Detail + Inference Questions

NOW you go back — but only to the exact paragraph you pre-labeled.

Because you know the location instantly, you reread only 1–2 sentences, not 1–2 paragraphs.

This is what makes the strategy feel like “no rereading” even though you’re doing tiny, surgical reviews.

STEP 7: Develop Fast Retrieval, Not Full Recall

The students who excel in RC say the same thing:

“I don’t remember the details — I remember where they are.”

That’s the point.

You don’t win RC by reading; you win RC by indexing the passage so well that retrieval is trivial.

Your paragraph labels + minimal markings = your index.

STEP 8: Practice Structure-Only Passages Weekly

Kingston students do a unique drill:

Structure-Only Passages

You read the passage without doing the questions — your only job is to:

identify passage type
label each paragraph
summarize the structure

This builds the one-pass skill much faster than doing full sections.

And because our class meets 4 nights a week, you repeat this process constantly — with real-time feedback, corrections, and personalized adjustments from your instructor.

This is why Kingston students develop a persistent, not temporary, RC improvement curve.

What You Get Once This Becomes Automatic

When the one-pass strategy “locks in,” you’ll feel:

less mental fatigue
faster question answering
far fewer rereads
complete control over the main point
better consistency from passage to passage
confidence instead of panic on dense science passages

RC stops being about memory and becomes about orientation.

How to Build a One-Pass, Zero-Re-read LSAT RC Strategy