Reading Strategies

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 1:24 pm

Reading Strategies

· What are the reading strategies?

Reading Efficiently by
Reading Intelligently

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.

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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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.

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.

Strategy 7: Use context to guess the meaning.

If you follow Strategy 1, and you determine that the word you don't
know IS important, then before using a dictionary, try to guess the meaning of
the word from the context. Context refers to the words and phrases surrounding
the word that you don't understand. Once you think you have guessed the correct
meaning, then look up the word in your dictionary to insure you have made a
correct guess. Then practice using the word in different contexts. This will
help you increase your understanding of the word, which in turn will help you
increase your vocabulary.

Being able to guess the meaning of words from their context is a
skill that is particularly helpful when you come across idioms. For example, in
the sentence

Jimmy lost track of time and was late for class,

the
phrase lost track of time is an idiom that means to forget about the time. If
you didn't know the meaning of this idiom and you looked up each word in the
dictionary, you still would not understand the sentence

Strategy 8: Ignore words that are unimportant.

When reading, you may often come upon a word or phrase that you
don't understand. Your first impulse may be to look up the word in your
dictionary. Before resorting to a dictionary, though, you should first
determine whether the word you don't know is important. If it isn't, then
ignore it. Consider the following sentence.