Some students have trouble reading well, which has a very negative effect on their studies. Perhaps you are in one of these cases:
- My reading speed is very slow, it exasperates me how long it takes to read a single page.
- I don’t understand the texts. It discourages me not knowing the meaning of so many words.
- I get lost very easily. There are times that I continue reading, but I have lost the thread of reading, I don’t know what I am reading at that moment.
- I get bored, I can’t read, I yawn and fall asleep.
Many students, especially those considered poor students, have a serious problem with reading: they don’t know how to read, and they haven’t learned to read well. This deficiency is dragged from lower courses and there comes a time when it takes its toll and causes failure, repetition of the course, and in general, discouragement of students when they start studying.
Here we are going to address the basic rules to read well:
Do Active Reading
Of course, nothing on a sofa or bed to read. Let’s take the book and underline it, make notes in the margins, etc. If we can’t, let’s take a notebook and make notes and cards with what seems most important to us, the concepts, definitions, and keywords that we have to memorize, the explanatory scheme of each chapter, etc., etc.
Reading will be slower, but we will compensate by understanding and memorizing much better, we will get bored much less, and we will stop losing concentration. Active reading of a chapter of a book can be equivalent to more than three or four passive readings of the same chapter. So going slow when doing the active reading is going faster in the long run.
Understand Reading
You have to make an effort to understand what you read. The dictionary, the encyclopedia, and Internet searches must be resources very close to the text we are reading. It is important that we are not too lazy to consult them. If you don’t understand a sentence at the beginning of your reading, it will be more difficult to understand the rest.
Try to find out the meaning of words and concepts that are not clear to you. Do not accumulate “ignorances”. If you can’t understand something, write it down in a notebook and look it up, either on the Internet or by asking your family for help, by calling a classmate, or ask the teacher as soon as you get to class if no one has been able to solve it before.
Be aware of what you read at all times. There are students who, if you asked them the name of the chapter and the epigraph of the book they are reading at that moment, would not know what to answer or would confuse it with a previous one.
To understand and memorize a reading well, it is very important to perfectly retain the titles of the different chapters, headings, subheadings, sections, etc. To retain and classify what we are reading, the brain needs to know how to store it with a certain order or logic. It is the way of not getting lost in so much alphabet soup. Therefore, take it as an obligation to memorize each epigraph and section, remember it from time to time while you are reading said section. It will be a way to mentally fix the content of a section with its title. Believe me, it is very important.
Remember the Difference Between Reading Well and Speed Reading
Do not confuse learning to read well with speed reading. The above tips are much more important for students who are struggling with studying than taking speed reading courses.
Speed reading is achieved by reading a lot of books and following some basic techniques that promote vertical instead of horizontal scrolling. The brain is much faster than the movement of the eye. For this reason, speed reading techniques encourage the capture of chained sentences (absorbing their meaning and the thread of the argument) and avoid going slowly word by word in each line.
It is said that the President of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy -and a brilliant Harvard student-, read a book of about 200 pages in about 10 minutes. Kennedy in just three seconds captured the essence of each page.
Who’ll Benefit from This
This type of reading is useful for politicians and company executives who must-read reports, documents, and memorandums in a very short time. Also, for students of higher or advanced courses. In my opinion, they are not recommended for students who are beginning to improve their study methods and are just beginning. Nonetheless, using an essay writer to deal with tons of assignments is suitable for students of all levels.
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