Have you been through in a situation whereby you have to re-read something several times to get a full understanding of the content? Or you ever read useful text , yet fail to gain any helpful information that you needed from it?
If the answer is YES! then you might should reading intelligently and not reading just by quantity.
In this topic, we are helping you with strategies to help your reading become efficiently.
1. THINK ABOUT YOU WANT TO KNOW
Ask yourself first why are reading it before start reading anything. Are you reading with a purpose, or just for pleasure? What do you want to know after you've read it?
Identify your purpose first. Once you done, then you examine the resource to see whether it's going to help you.
Example, with a book, an easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings.
The introduction will let you to know who the book is intended for. Chapter headings gives you an overall view of the content.
Try to look again either the resource meets your needs or not, if not stop reading!
2. KNOW HOW DEEPLY TO STUDY THE MATERIAL
If you only want need the shallowest knowledge of a subject, skim material. Here, you can read only chapter headings, introduction, and summaries.
However, when you need a moderate level of information on a subject, scan the text. You read for summaries and chapter introduction in detail. Speed read the contents of the chapter, just picked out the key words/concept.
Only when you need a full information on subject, then is it worth studying the text more detail. here it is best to skim the text first i order to get an overview/general knowledge on the subject.
3.ACTIVE READING
Practicing "active reading" which underlining key information and taking notes will help you if you intend to go detail on your reading. Doing this, eventually helps you keep your mind focuses on the subject that you read, and stops you from thinking other things or being distracted.
4. DIFFERENT MATERIAL, DIFFERENT WAYS OF READING
Different types of reading material holds information in different places an in different ways, and they have breadths and depths of coverage.
You can extract the information precisely by understanding first the layout of the material that you read.
Example, reading for magazines, scan the contents tables and turn directly to interesting topic. Newspaper tend to be arranged in sections. If you read paper often, you can quickly learn and skip which section is useful and not for you.
5. Glossary! Use glossaries with Technical Documents
Keep a compile of glossary beside you as you read large amount of difficult technical material. It is really useful to note down the key concepts in your own words, and refer to these when necessary.
START READING!
