Apply Active Reading Strategies

Here are some basic tips for focusing on the important aspects of a written passage. As you prepare for your test, try applying these techniques to everything you read—from the morning paper, to your sports magazine, to the novel you are reading.

Pre-Reading

You can often get a pretty good idea of what a story or article is about by quickly glancing over it. Before you read the entire thing, put it through a quick pre-reading survey:

• Is there a title? If so, what does it tell you about the article?
• Are there pictures, charts, or illustrations? What information do they give you?
• What does the first sentence say?
• What can you tell about the source of the information?
• Does the article present fact, opinion, or both?

Based on your pre-reading, you can often make an accurate prediction about the content of the text.

Active Reading

It’s probably been drilled into your head that you shouldn’t write in books. Although this is the respectful choice if the book doesn’t belong to you, you can mark up your own books, magazines, and newspapers. And you should mark them up. That’s part of active reading, which will help you focus on the meaning of the text. Mark words that are repeated. Write down any questions you have as you read, or circle words you don’t understand. Underline the sentence, or sentences, that introduce or sum up the author’s main point, as well as the details that support that main point.

After Reading

Before you move on, think about what you have just read and make sure you fully understand it:

• Identify the key points. What are the most important statements the author made? List them.
• Separate fact from opinion. Note which statements are supported by facts and which statements represent the author's opinion.
• Summarize. Try to shrink these statements down to one or two sentences.
• Any questions? If you wrote down questions that remain unanswered when you finish reading, take another look. Focus on the specific sentences or passages that prompted the questions.

Summarizing

Being able to sum up the material you have read is an important aspect of reading comprehension. It demonstrates that you have understood the argument well enough to state the author’s main idea in your own words. Here is a sample paragraph of information to be summarized:

Hollywood movies and television series tend to show criminal profiling as a mysterious, supernatural talent, something like mind-reading or predicting the future. In fact, criminal profiling consists of close analysis of crime scene evidence, using a large body of information gathered from other offenders to make reasonable assumptions about the offender in a particular case. Like any other human activity, some people have more of a knack for profiling than others, but anyone can learn the basic principles and techniques of criminal profiling.

An accurate summary of the paragraph’s topic would be something like this:

Criminal profiling is not a mysterious talent, but a set of principles and techniques that can be taught.

This sentence sums up the author’s argument; everything else in the paragraph provides details. If you get stuck thinking of a summary, or have any other trouble with a passage, keep reading to learn ways to move past your problems.