Reading Strategies

Reading strategies

Think About What You Want to Know
Before you start reading anything, ask yourself why you're reading it. Are you reading with a purpose, or just for pleasure? What do you want to know after you've read it?
Once you know your purpose, you can examine the resource to see whether it's going to help you.
For example, with a book, an easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. The introduction should let you know who the book is intended for, and what it covers. Chapter headings will give you an overall view of the structure of the subject.
Ask yourself whether the resource meets your needs, and try to work out if it will give you the right amount of knowledge. If you think that the resource isn't ideal, don't waste time reading it.
Remember that this also applies to content that you subscribe to, such as journals or magazines, and web-based RSS and social media news feeds – don't be afraid to prune these resources if you are not getting value from some publishers.

Know How Deeply to Study the Material
Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of a 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. This is when you read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail. You can then speed read https://www.mindtools.com/images/tooltip/reading-plus-grey.gif the contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and concepts. (When looking at material in this way, it's often worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.)

Only when you need full knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text in detail. Here it's 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 then fit the detail gained from a full reading of the material. (SQ3R https://www.mindtools.com/images/tooltip/reading-plus-grey.gif is a good technique for getting a deep understanding of a text.)

Video Tutorial


Link Practices

http://www.benchmarkeducation.com/best-practices-library/comprehension-strategies.html

References:

http://www.salisbury.edu/counseling/new/7_critical_reading_strategies.html