How to be a stronger and more effective reader.

Active reading means purposefully interacting with the text. It involves activities such as highlighting key points, taking notes, asking questions, summarizing, reorganizing information and reflecting. Active reading is especially helpful for academic studies, research, and professional development, as it promotes deeper understanding and greater retention. Active reading is the opposite of passive reading, which is what we sometimes do when we skim over the words without much thought or intention. 

SQ3R is a reading strategy you can use when you have an article, essay, or chapter to read for a class, and you really want to comprehend it. It can be used to approach a difficult or long reading. It can also be used when you need to read quickly to gain an understanding of a reading in a hurry!

As you're skimming the text, try to become curious about it by asking yourself some questions about it before you begin reading. 

Asking yourself questions about the text before you get started reading will provide you with an additional purpose for reading: to get the answers to those questions. Your brain will be more likely to work for you instead of getting distracted.

Not sure what questions to ask yourself? Sometimes the author will have some at the end of a chapter. Other times, your teacher may provide some. The easiest way to come up with guiding questions is to turn the titles, headings, and bold words you noticed when surveying into questions. If all else fails, ask yourself, "What is the point of this reading?" 

Remember, these first 2 steps (Survey and Question) happen together and are really a quick little investment to get more out of your reading. 

In this step, you will read the text. Focus on reading in chunks, or manageable sections. 

Pace yourself. 

For very complex or dense material, such as tax forms, research articles, or the FAFSA application, this may mean reading only a few lines at a time. 

For more approachable material, such as a textbook, a chunk is morel likely to be a paragraph or two with its own heading. 

If you are reading a short story or novel, you will find that you can read longer sections at a time. 

As you read each chunk stop periodically to recite; say or write a brief summary of what you just read in your own words. This is also a good time to answer those questions you came up with. Think about reciting as taking a quick pause to make sure you are comprehending along the way. 

Have you ever read something, and when you got to the end, you realized that you were not so sure what the reading was all about? Reciting helps prevent this. If you can say or write what something is about in your own words, that is a good sign that you are understanding the author's points, and it is okay to go on to read the next section. 

After you've read the entire work or a large section, you should review what you've read. This step involves looking back over the smaller sections to make sure you understand how it all fits together. 

If your purpose is to put information into long-term memory, maybe to prepare for a test or because you need to know it for your career, you need to do spaced review. This means putting longer and longer time periods in between review or study sessions. 

Annotation is the practice of adding notes directly to a text. While it is a method of notetaking, it is also a reading strategy because it can improve our comprehension, particularly on complex readings. 

When we need a deep understanding of a reading, perhaps to write an essay or pass a test, and we have plenty of time to read, annotation is an effective approach.

A summary is a shortened, paraphrased version of the original text. 

When using SQ3R and when annotating, we learned to "sum up" as we read, briefly restating each section in our own words. This is the basic idea of summarizing.   

Writing a summary is like making a big pot of soup and boiling it down until only the main elements are left. The meat, potatoes and vegetables are still there, but all of the extra liquid is gone.