Reading Skills

Active Reading

When you are reading it is often useful to highlight, underline and annotate the text as you go on. This emphasises information in your mind, and helps you to review important points after you have finished studying the text.

Active reading 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 find that active reading helps significantly, then it may be worth photocopying information in more expensive texts. You can then read and mark the photocopies.

Knowing What You Want to Know

The most important thing to know is the goal of your study - what do you want to know after reading the text? Once you know this you can examine the text to see whether it is going to move you towards the goal.

An easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings or check the number of entries in the index.

The introduction should let you know who the book is targeted at and what it seeks to achieve, while the chapter headings will show an overall view of the structure of the subject. The index gives you precise listings of where and how often your topic is mentioned,

While you are looking at the text, ask yourself if it is targeted at you, or assumes too much or too little knowledge. Would other material meet your needs more closely?

Knowing How Deeply to Study the Material

Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of the subject, you can skim the 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, and may 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. Once you have done this you can read it in detail while seeing how the information presented relates to the overall structure of the subject.

How to Study Different Sorts of Material

Different sorts of text hold information in different places, in different ways, with different depths and breadths of coverage. By understanding the layout of the material you are reading, you can extract all useful information much more efficiently.

Reading Magazines and Newspapers

These tend to give a very fragmented coverage of a subject, typically concentrating on the most interesting and glamorous parts of a topic while ignoring the less interesting but often essential background. Typically areas of useful information are padded out with large areas of irrelevant data or with advertising.

The most effective way of dealing with magazines is to scan their contents tables or indexes, turning directly to interesting articles. If the articles are useful they can be cut out and filed into a folder specifically covering that sort of information. The magazine can then be binned. In this way you begin to build up sets of related articles which may go some way towards explaining the scope of a subject. Information can be retrieved easily and quickly.

Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you read a paper frequently you can learn which sections have useful information, and which ones can be skipped altogether.

By applying an intelligent way of reading newspapers and magazines you can significantly speed the time it takes to extract the information you need from them.

Article Types, and How to Read Them

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 significant 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 are designed to advance a viewpoint. 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 recognising its type, you can extract information from it quickly and efficiently.

Dealing With Junk Mail Effectively

Dealing with junk mail can take up a significant amount of time. A useful technique to try to apply is to touch each document only once: either act on it, bin it or file it. Effectively written direct mail will convey its purpose immediately, and will assist you in extracting and acting on information rapidly. Badly written direct mail is tedious and can take a lot of time to digest. It is much better to dispose of it immediately.

When you decide to act on direct mail, it is best to do so by phone, fax or email, rather than by writing a formal letter.

Reading Technical Information

Technical information is typically less friendly than other information. It is often complex and assumes a high level of initial knowledge.

Manuals are often badly written - a manual is often supplied with a product purely because it is expected. In many cases it will have been given to a junior member of staff to prepare, and will not have been properly edited or reviewed.

Before wading into technical documentation, assess who it has been written for.

Is it too basic to meet your needs, or is it so advanced that you cannot understand it?

In the latter case it may be more cost effective to bring in an expert to do the job.

If referring to specific information, it is most effective to use the table of contents and index to find the appropriate section.

If you are reading large amounts of the material, it may be effective to photocopy the glossary, and keep this beside you. It will probably also be useful to note down the key concepts in your own words, and refer to them when necessary. effective way of As with other sorts of material it may be most effective to skim the material before reading it in depth.

Reading 'Whole Subject' Documents

When you are reading a document, such as a company report, which purports to give an overall analysis of a subject, it is easy to accept the writer's structure of thought, and miss the fact that important information has been omitted or that irrelevant detail has been included.

Where you are reviewing this sort of document, an effective technique is to compile your own table of contents headings before you open the document. You can then use this table of contents to read the document in the order that you want.

Using this technique will allow you to spot where important information is missing or has been obscured, and helps you to avoid trivia. If the writer has a better knowledge of the structure of the topic, this helps you to recognise and adjust your initial view of the best structure.

Survey, Question, Read, Recall, Review (SQ3R)

SQ3R is a formal technique used to learn from a document by firstly understanding it, and building a mental framework into which facts can then be fitted. SQ3R stands for the stages in which information can be assimilated. These stages are explained below:

Survey

Survey the document: scan the contents, introduction, chapter introductions and chapter summaries to pick up a shallow overview of the text and form an opinion of whether it will be of any help.

Question

Make a note of any questions that come to mind or particularly interest you about the subject as a result of your survey. Perhaps rescan the document to see if any questions stand out. These questions can be considered almost as study goals - understanding the answers can help you to structure the information in your own mind.

Read

Now read the document. Read through it in detail, taking care to understand all the points that are relevant. In the case of some texts this reading may be very slow if there is a lot of dense and complicated information.

Recall

Once you have read the document, or a section of it, run through it in your mind a number of times. Isolate out the core facts or the essential processes behind the subject, and then see how other information fits around them. Some things may require more recital than others for them to sink in.

Review

Once you have run through the exercise of Recalling the information, you can move on to the stage of reviewing the information. This review can be by re-reading the document, by expanding your notes, or by discussing the material with someone else. A particularly effective method of reviewing information is to have to teach it to someone else.