Reading Strategies

Though it may seem time-consuming at first, as you learn to more efficiently search, scan, and skim texts for key ideas, you will find that annotating and finding main ideas will actually speed up your reading rate and comprehension. Describing and explaining your reactions and connections to a written work will help you remember the text better and provide valuable prewriting insights for essay assignments as well as for reading complex documents such as research experiments and findings, legal documents, persuasive essays, or literary masterpieces. Questioning a work and the author's use of vocabulary can give you insight into the author's attitude toward the topic of the text. Using reading strategies makes you an active participant in reading and connecting with written works. You just might find that reading can even be that much more enjoyable.