Good reading strategies help you to
read in a very efficient way. Using them, you aim to get the maximum
benefit from your reading with the minimum effort. This section will
show you how to use six different strategies to read intelligently.
Strategy 1: Knowing what you want to know
The
first thing to ask yourself is: Why you are reading the text? Are you
reading with a purpose or just for pleasure? What do you want to know
after reading it?
Once you know this, you can examine the text to see whether it is going to move you towards this goal.
An
easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter
headings. The introduction should let you know at whom the book is
targeted, and what it seeks to achieve. Chapter headings will give you
an overall view of the structure of the subject.
Ask yourself
whether the book meets your needs. Ask yourself if it assumes too much
or too little knowledge. If the book isn't ideal, would it be better to
find a better one?
Strategy 2: Knowing how deeply to study the material
Where
you only need the shallowest knowledge of the subject, you can skim
material. Here you read only chapter headings, introductions and
summaries.
If you need a moderate level of information on a
subject, then you can scan the text. Here you read the chapter
introductions and summaries in detail. You may then speed read the
contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and
concepts. At this level of looking at the document it is worth paying
attention to diagrams and graphs.
Only when you need detailed
knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text. Here it is best to
skim the material first to get an overview of the subject. This gives
you an understanding of its structure, into which you can fit the
detail gained from a full, receptive reading of the material. SQ3R is a
good technique for getting a deep understanding of a text.
Strategy 3: Active Reading
When
you are reading a document in detail, it often helps if you
highlight, underline and annotate it as you go on. This emphasizes
information in your mind, and helps you to review important points
later.
Doing this also helps to keep your mind focused on the material and stops it wandering.
This
is obviously only something to do if you own the document! If you own
the book and find that active reading helps, then it may be worth
photocopying information in more expensive texts. You can then read and
mark the photocopies.
If you are worried about destroying the
material, ask yourself how much your investment of time is worth. If
the benefit you get by active reading reasonably exceeds the value of
the book, then the book is disposable.
Strategy 4: How to study different sorts of material
Different
sorts of documents hold information in different places and in
different ways. They have different depths and breadths of coverage. By
understanding the layout of the material you are reading, you can
extract useful information much more efficiently.
Reading Magazines and Newspapers:
These
tend to give a very fragmented coverage of an area. They will
typically only concentrate on the most interesting and glamorous parts
of a topic - this helps them to sell copies! They will often ignore
less interesting information that may be essential to a full
understanding of a subject. Typically areas of useful information are
padded out with large amounts of irrelevant waffle or with advertising.
The
most effective way of getting information from magazines is to scan
the contents tables or indexes and turn directly to interesting
articles. If you find an article useful, then cut it out and file it in
a folder specifically covering that sort of information. In this way
you will build up sets of related articles that may begin to explain
the subject.
Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you
read a paper often, you can learn quickly which sections are useful
and which ones you can skip altogether.
Reading Individual Articles:
Articles within newspapers and magazines tend to be in three main types:
News Articles:
Here
the most important information is presented first, with information
being less and less useful as the article progresses. News articles are
designed to explain the key points first, and then flesh them out
with detail.
Opinion Articles:
Opinion
articles present a point of view. Here the most important information
is contained in the introduction and the summary, with the middle of
the article containing supporting arguments.
Feature Articles:
These
are written to provide entertainment or background on a subject.
Typically the most important information is in the body of the text.
If you know what you want from an article, and recognize its type, you can extract information from it quickly and efficiently.
Strategy 5: Reading 'whole subject' documents
When
you are reading an important document, it is easy to accept the
writer's structure of thought. This can mean that you may not notice
that important information has been omitted or that irrelevant detail
has been included. A good way of recognizing this is to compile your own
table of contents before you open the document. You can then use this
table of contents to read the document in the order that you want.
You will be able to spot omissions quickly.
Strategy 6: Using glossaries with technical documents
If
you are reading large amounts of difficult technical material, it may
be useful to photocopy or compile a glossary. Keep this beside you as
you read. It will probably also be useful to note down the key
concepts in your own words, and refer to them when necessary.
