Are you a productive reader?
Reading is an important and often endless task in college, yet most students detest it. Why? Because they’re not productive. If reading a twenty page chapter takes you forty-five minutes, then no wonder you don’t want to do it. For most classes, there’s no way around reading, so why not make sure you’re getting the most out of it?
1. Don’t tackle too much at once.
If you’re assigned a five chapter chunk for homework, work on one chapter at a time. This doesn’t make the challenge seem endless. Also, don’t procrastinate, I know it’s hard, but if you start early and have time for breaks (a few minutes to an hour to a day), then it’s much easier.
2. Read once for main points
Skim through the reading, get all the main points, headers, bold words, everything that sticks out.
3. Take good notes.
Write down the big picture, either in an outline, a mind map, anything.
4. Read once more for details.
Once you have your notes on the important ideas, go back through and see if there’s any details you missed. Think dates, names and places, stuff that your professor might ask, but isn’t necessarily what you’d call “important” in the grand scheme of things. This is more for history, political science, and psychology classes. When you’re getting into physics or the like, this isn’t as important.
5. Study your notes.
Now that you’ve got your great notes, don’t look at the book again. If you’ve gotten the important info out of if, you don’t need it anymore. Knowing that you only have to go through your book once or twice helps.
This page was last modified on January 12, 2008 @ 12:56 pm
9 Responses
Yeah your right about that, though I never really liked to read stuff for college, because I had too, but I do read a lot of books, just the one I like of course.
Wow I’m so glad I found this blog. I’ve been searching for help with studying and I finally found it ^^ Thank you for the tips.
Great tips. Once of the worst things for me in college was when the previous owner of my textbook highlighted or underlined things. I would then read his take on things and not my own! By sophomore year, I made it a point not to buy marked-up books, even though they were more expensive. It’s amazing how other’s notes can impact your productivity.
Oh definitely. Unless you’re lucky enough to get the book that belonged to the valedictorian, following highlights aren’t a good idea. It can interfere with your own take on the material.
Reading my text books has always been something I’ve struggled with since going to college. I think I have grown accustom to reading on the web so much that picking up a book is a foreign practice now.
Any tips for someone like me who rarely reads more than 5 chapters in a text book per semester and still manages to get A’s?
Well, listen to your professor, I guess.
great tips! i think this was one of my biggest problems when I was still in school - it’s so easy to spend a lot of time reading without actually learning more if you don’t do this right..
Yeah, I could keep doing that. I really think I’m missing out on a lot though by not getting into the text books very much.
I appreciate the tips - I’ll try to adopt some of them this semester.
Jan 16, 2008