Verbal Strategy convoluted text

[Lunasly]

Just a quick question for you guys, but does anyone else have trouble understanding the following excerpt from a verbal passage. What strategies do you use to get past the fluff? I find it so convoluted and given that it is the first paragraph of the passage I end up having a poor idea of what the passage is about.

Note: The following verbal excerpt is from the AAMC self-assessment. You have to highlight the text below to see it.

...Within Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the world is divided between the public realm and the private, almost delusional, relation between Victor and the monster, according to Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalytic critic, between the symbolic and imaginary orders. On the one hand, there are Alphonse Frankenstein, dutiful father and judge, the families of the Frankensteins and the De Laceys, the possibility of Victor’s marriage with Elizabeth, the responsible science of M. Krempe, and the operation of law in the trial of Justine and the imprisonment of Victor....

Thanks for the help.

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[iliveinmyguitar]

I know these suck man.. What I tend to do, and started doing yesterday which brought my score up from 4 to an 11 on one of the TPR practice verbal tests, is read the first paragraph as slow as I need to in order for me to understand what they are talking about and than the reading speeds up naturally. Once I understand what the psg is about there is a context to everything else that the author is talking about and the rest of the text fits like pieces of a puzzle in my mind (hope that made sense). The example you provided obviously is too convoluted to fully understand it the first time for us regular folks. But the words that stood out to me the most when I first read that were: 1) world divided..public..private.. 2) between symbolic and imaginary.... I would assume that those contrasts would be important in the rest of the passage so I would just take note of those and move on, hoping that the rest of the psg would clear up.

 

[Lunasly]

Thanks for the advice. Your strategy sounds a lot like what PanRoasted uses (which is what I currently use). I'll try and read the first paragraph a little slower to fully understand it.

Thanks!