Article: How To Succeed Through Reading Comprehension

Regardless of the degree you intend to go for, all degrees will require that you learn through reading. Reading comprehension is an important skill it will take time and effort to learn. But once you learn how to read a text properly, you will have a skill that will benefit you for years to come. Given that this skill can take years to master, try not to become too disappointed if you don't succeed right away. There are a certain number of steps, techniques or methods that you should take to acquire this skill.

Once you've examined the text, try asking yourself questions and finding answers for them, become a more active reader, read aloud and finally review everything you've done.

1. Examine the text: your first encounter with a text book shouldn't be designed to intimidate you. No matter what you do, don't become discouraged at just how little you might understand after the first reading. Your first examination should be a general and relatively stress free experience. Don't try to understand everything at once. If you encounter something that you don't understand, move on to the next section. Try to complete your initial examination in as short a time as possible.
   
   
2. Ask questions: once you have completed your first cursory examination of the text, make a note of each chapter heading, and sections within that chapter. The next step is to ask questions based on each chapter and then try answering those questions. This is designed to get you thinking about the subject matter and how the author chose to answer questions about that subject.
   
   
3. Become an active reader: this is an extremely important stage in developing your reading comprehension skill. As an active reader, you will start to interact with the text with input of your own. This might including highlighting the text, writing comments or questions in the margin, and generating an outline from the text that will help you see the entirety of it at a glance. Developing an outline will be your first attempt to add your own structure to what you're reading. This outline will be your own attempt to reproduce the ideas, arguments and concepts of the text into some sort of organized document that can be used as a study aid for exams and for any essays you may have to write.
   
   
4. Read aloud: at first this may seem like a frivolous thing to do but reading aloud is one step away from actually offering a lecture on a particular subject. There's just one thing missing: an understanding of what it is that your're reading. Hearing the subject read aloud puts you in the position of trying to comprehend what is written from an audio source.
   
   
5. Review: now you can commit the structure of the text, its arguments, facts, etc. to memory so that they can be recalled at moment's notice. This is where your outline becomes important. A successful review of the text will only be as good as the outline that you've developed earlier on.