How to earn more than you invest in reading

Are you really reading?

You may have found yourself in a position similar to this before. You have a book you’ll be quizzed about in your next college literature class, only your friends convinced you to go to the big party at the frat the night before. Or maybe you fell asleep reading it.

The next morning, with a confused mind and a hangover, you leaf through the book by James Joyce. Ulises in an hour, with Fruit Loops and strong coffee. The book reads like an elaborate joke written for hungover college students.

Still, maybe you’ll remember a detail or two and get a couple of points you wouldn’t otherwise have received on the quiz. You won something. Little bit.

I confess that I have only one hour to prepare to teach. The old man and the sea from Hemingway, who somehow hadn’t read yet, to a cheery group of 60 college students. Luckily it’s short.

But suppose your boss throws you a 50-page whitepaper that you need to report on in 20 minutes.

Regardless of the circumstances, you do lots of different types of reading from emails to biographies, and your brain adapts to the needs of the situation (or not). The more skilled you are as a reader and writer, the easier this adaptation becomes.

read with purpose

HAS reading spectrum it exists, from the challenging to the simple, and I’ll mention just a few here to give you some context before I share some tricks to tailor your reading style. You change your reading depending on your purpose and how much time you have:

• Critical: the serious, methodical and evaluative. Its objective is to retain, learn, discuss, evaluate.
• I laughed: the studious, attentive and focused. He intends to learn, but not necessarily assess or evaluate.
• Strategic: the fast, planned and determined. This is the type I will describe in more detail. You don’t actually read the whole article, which makes it different from the next guy.
• Speed: the super fast and systematic. You can take courses that teach you how to do this in different ways successfully.

Just to make sure I’m not leading you down the path of insanity, check out this quote and who said it:

Reading, after a certain age, takes the mind too far away from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thought.

Albert Einstein

So my goal here is to give you tools that allow you to adjust your reading speed based on circumstances.

strategic reading

You can do strategic reading at various paces depending on how much time you have. This is the best quality: you can adapt as you go. Here are the steps:

1. Consider how much time you have and how long the piece is. This lets you know how to pace yourself as you go through the process. You may even decide that you need to skip some steps.
2. Look at the title and quickly decide what you think the writing is about. You can spend more or less time with this depending on your limitations. Guess what you think the article will do given how long it is and what you think the title means.
3. Quickly scan the first paragraph for a thesis statement. Thesis statements capture the entire paper in one sentence. Most writers use them and they give you a method to start categorizing information. If it’s a hard copy, you can underline it. If you can, take a moment to really process and remember the meaning of the thesis.
4. Flip to the end and read the final paragraph carefully. This should start to help you start drawing concepts together and making sense of them.
5. Go back to the beginning and read all the headers (if the script has them). Again, this provides information to help you categorize. Also, look at all the pictures. and read the subtitlesas authors often include key information in graphical form.
6. Go back to the beginning and read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. This will almost guarantee that you get to the topic sentence, which will provide the gist of the article’s content.
7. Take a minute to go over the entire document in your mind. If you have time, write a summary sentence in your own words that captures the most important ideas.

One of the most important concepts to remember is that these steps are flexible. If you have relatively little time, move through them quickly.

So let’s say you only have 15 minutes for a 20 page paper. Try to do 1-6 quickly. Maybe there’s no time for that, try 1-3 or just 1 and 6 (if you’re short on time, just read the first sentence of each paragraph instead of the first and last).

I hope these tips help you. Get the information you really need from your reading.. They saved me in college and I think you’ll be surprised how helpful they are.