"Reading well" does not mean reading everything at the same pace and with the same technique. As a college student, much of your reading will be assigned material. You get information from everything you read and yet you don't read everything for the same reason or in the same way. For example, a novel can be read quickly just to get the story, whereas a poem might be read slowly, perhaps several times to determine the meaning. Good readers are flexible readers. Once they determine their purpose for reading, they adjust their rate to fit the type of material they are reading.
Five Categories of Reading Rates
Examples
Imagine this: You come home from school or work to find a stack of mail in the mailbox. As you walk into the house, you flip through it, scanning for anything important or interesting. There are two bills, a letter from a good friend, your monthly subscriptions to Newsweek and Nature Conservancy, and seven pieces of apparent junk mail.
You put aside the bills to be paid at the end of the month. You skim quickly through the junk mail to make sure nothing of value is hidden in the stack, find a reimbursement check from your insurance company, and throw away the rest. You set your Newsweek magazine on your desk to read later, then sit down to read the letter from your friend. You read it twice slowly, savoring every word and conjuring up images of your friend as you go. Chuckling over your friend's antics, you change into your jogging clothes. Then before you leave the house, you take a few minutes to scan your Nature Conservancy and then file it away with the rest of your magazines. Scanning the articles in this magazine gives a lot of information to mull over.
While jogging, a possible essay topic for your English class comes to you as a result of having scanned your Nature Conservancy magazine and you brainstorm about what you will write tonight for your essay proposal.
Isn't this process a vast improvement over throwing all your mail into an unsorted pile on your desk thinking you will get to it later (and never getting around to it)?
You probably already use the first four types of reading – normal, careful, scanning, and skimming. To use the fifth, rapid reading, you need to be able to do the following:
This process may seem awkward and difficult at first but if you stick with it, you will soon find your speed and comprehension increasing dramatically.
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