This is an important concept: when you are reading it is often useful to highlight, underline and annotate the text as you go on. This emphasises information in your mind, and helps you to review important points after you have finished studying the text.
Active reading helps to keep your mind focused on the material and stops it wandering.
This is obviously only something to do if you own the document! If you find that active reading helps significantly, then it may be worth photocopying information in more expensive texts. You can then read and mark the photocopies.
Knowing what you want to know:
The most important thing to know is the goal of your study - what do you want to know after reading the text? Once you know this you can examine the text to see whether it is going to move you towards the goal.
An easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. The introduction should let you know who the book is targeted at and what it seeks to achieve, while the chapter headings will show an overall view of the structure of the subject.
While you are looking at the text, ask yourself if it is targeted at you, or assumes too much or too little knowledge. Would other material meet your needs more closely?
Knowing how deeply to study the material:
Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of the subject, you can skim the material. Here you read only chapter headings, introductions and summaries.
If you need a moderate level of information on a subject, then you can scan the text. Here you read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail, and may speed-read the contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and concepts. At this level of looking at the document it is worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.
Only when you need detailed knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text. Here it is best to skim the material first to get an overview of the subject. Once you have done this you can read it in detail while seeing how the information presented relates to the overall structure of the subject.
How to study different sorts of materialDifferent sorts of text hold information in different places, in different ways, with different depths and breadths of coverage. By understanding the layout of the material you are reading, you can extract all useful information much more efficiently.
Reading Magazines and Newspapers:
These tend to give a very fragmented coverage of a subject, typically concentrating on the most interesting and glamorous parts of a topic while ignoring the less interesting but often essential background. Typically areas of useful information are padded out with large areas of irrelevant data or with advertising.
The most effective way of dealing with magazines is to scan their contents tables or indexes, turning directly to interesting articles. If the articles are useful they can be cut out and filed into a folder specifically covering that sort of information. The magazine can then be binned. In this way you begin to build up sets of related articles which may go some way towards explaining the scope of a subject. Information can be retrieved easily and quickly.
Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you read a paper frequently you can learn which sections have useful information, and which ones can be skipped altogether.
By applying an intelligent way of reading newspapers and magazines you can significantly speed the time it takes to extract the information you need from them.
Article Types, and How to Read them:
Articles within newspapers and magazines tend to be in three main types:
News Articles:here the most important information is presented first, with information being less and less significant as the article progresses. News articles are designed to explain the key points first, and then flesh them out with detail.
Opinion Articles:Opinion articles are designed to advance a viewpoint. Here the most important information is contained in the introduction and the summary, with the middle of the article containing supporting arguments.
Feature Articles:These are written to provide entertainment or background on a subject. Typically the most important information is in the body of the text.
If you know what you want from an article, and recognising its type, you can extract information from it quickly and efficiently.
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