Active reading

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Today's topic for students is active reading. This simply means reading something with a determination to understand and evaluate it for its relevance to your needs. Simply reading and re-reading the material isn't an effective way to understand and learn. Actively and critically engaging with the content can save you time.

Try these techniques to make your reading active

Underline or highlight key words and phrases as you read. When you return to it later on, you can easily see which points you identified as important. Be selective - too much highlighting won't help.

Make annotations in the margin to summarise points, raise questions, challenge what you've read, jot down examples and so on. You can do this in printed books or etexts. This takes more thought than highlighting, so you'll probably remember the content better. (Use sticky notes if you don't want to mark the text.)

Read critically by asking questions of the text. Who wrote it? When? Who is the intended audience? Does it link with other material you've studied in the module? Why do you think it was written? Is it an excerpt from a longer piece of text?

Test yourself by reading for half an hour, putting the text away and jotting down the key points from memory. Go back to the text to fill in gaps.

Look for 'signposts' that help you understand the text - phrases like 'most importantly', 'in contrast', 'on the other hand'.

Explain what you've read to someone else.

Record yourself reading the module material or your notes, and listen to the recording while you're travelling or doing household chores.

One active reading method is SQ3R. SQ3R stands for ‘Survey’, ‘Question’ and three Rs: ‘Read’, ‘Recall’ and ‘Review’. These are five techniques you can use to read a book or an article:

• Survey Look through the book and get a sense of whether it’s useful or not. Look at the index, contents, the chapter titles and the introduction.
• Question If the book looks useful then examine it in more detail. Ask yourself questions about it. Where are the relevant sections? Who is the author? Have you heard of them? Are they someone your tutor mentioned in last week’s seminar? What are the aims of the book? Ask yourself the five Ws about what you are reading: Who, What, When, Where and Why.
• Read if there’s one section that’s particularly relevant, read that section in two ways. First, read quickly, making sure you get a good sense of what is being said and what’s relevant and what isn’t. Second, read the section again but this time make notes of the important points.
• Recall Once you have finished reading the relevant section, go over it in your mind several times. Can you summarise the key points without referring back to the book or to your notes?
• Review Go back through the text again. Make notes of anything you missed out in your original reading. Has the book told you everything you needed to know? If not, what else do you need to read? Has the book pointed you towards any other books? What do you need to do next?