Reading Effectively for Study

Reading for study is not the same activity as reading for pleasure, a fact that many students take a long, painful time to learn. In college, you are asked to read a great deal in a short time and to remember in detail what you have read. This is a new experience for most students coming to college.

Techniques for successful reading are numerous, but most boil down to a prescription for staying active in the reading process, questioning and interpreting as you read. Francis Robinson of Ohio State University has devised a technique called the SQ3R Reading Method, five steps for effective reading:

Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review

• By survey, he means taking an overview of the reading assignment to get a sense of its overall thrust.
• By question, he means asking yourself what the author is trying to get at, going after the who, what, when, why, and where of the subject.
• By read, he means carefully reading for meaning, noting main points and key ideas.
• By recite, he means stopping from time to time to recite to yourself from memory key ideas in the reading, rephrasing them in your own words.
• By review, he means looking over the chapter later, after you have read it, to refresh your memory and help the ideas you have read stick.

Professor Robinson's technique lays out the key processes you must go through to read successfully, even if you don't faithfully follow SQ3R. Whether you are reading a science textbook or a French novel, you should plan to scan it, question it, read it actively, rephrase its main ideas to yourself, and review it once you're finished. The most successful readers will read as if engaged in a one-on-one conversation, hearing the author out for a few sentences and then asking questions, clarifying claims or arguments, reviewing points that have been made. This is one of the reasons studying needs to be done in a quiet place without distractions -- you don't want your conversation with the author to be interrupted so you lose your train of thought.

Aids to memory while reading are legion, and different people thrive with different methods. The basic principle behind them all, however, is constant: stay intellectually engaged with the material. Perhaps the most durable aid to memory is notes taken while reading. It is also the most time-consuming. The idea is to take notes on main points, putting those points into your own words. The act of putting the material into your own words forces you to understand it; the act of writing it down reinforces your memory of it and distills it for study when you are preparing for a test.

A much more common aid these days is highlighting (or the old standby, underlining). Since most students own their books, defacing them is not a problem. Highlighting can be an effective tool, particularly in preparing the book for review later. But it can also be an effective means for shutting off half your mind while studying. Highlighting can allow you to note main points as you speed read without really thinking about them, without putting them into your own words for understanding, and without integrating them into the sense of the chapter or book as a whole. If you use highlighting, then, be sure also to write notes or questions in the margin, or at least review what you have highlighted before you go on to something else to be sure you have captured the gist of what you have read.