Reading Effectively

Reading is much more than letting your eyes skim across the words on a page or screen. When a professor assigns a reading, they don’t much care whether your eyes have tracked every word in every sentence. They care that you understand what you have read. Unless you focus on that understanding, though, you are more likely to forget the ideas, even right after you have read them.

If you want to remember more of what you read, you need to pay attention while you do it. Reading is an activity, and as such, it requires your engagement if you are going to do it well.

People who read effectively use a variety of skills and techniques:

We’ll take each of these ideas in turn in the following chapters.


Text Attribution

This chapter contains material taken from the chapter “Read Effectively” from The Word on College Reading and Writing by Carol Burnell, Jaime Wood, Monique Babin, Susan Pesznecker, and Nicole Rosevear and is used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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