After a go at a Reading Comprehension passage or two, you’ve come to realize that Reading Comprehension might not be a total breeze just because you know how to read. But then you hit your next mental block, which is the belief that studying for RC is pointless. How can a few months of studying change the way you read? You’ve been reading for hundreds of months—since you were a wee thing—and how you read now is just ingrained in you, right?

Be honest, how often do you regularly read something that is multiple paragraphs long while keeping track of multiple things at once? (The pictures in the BuzzFeed “articles” don’t count as paragraphs). With the reading for your classes, you’re either reading for the facts or for a general sense of what’s going on so you can raise your hand at least once a class (or every other class). And, you have as much time as you’re willing to spend to reread paragraphs to make sure you have the right idea.

RC is completely different from the reading you typically do, which means that how to do RC is actually not already ingrained in you. It’s a skill set that you can master with practice.