Reading skills are essential if you want to do well in your exams or pieces of coursework which involve essays or reports based upon passages you have to read. The points listed below should help you get the most out of your reading.
A library is particularly useful as you have access to many other books which can help you with your reading. Having a dictionary at hand to help you with any tricky vocabulary will help you understand the text more fully and improve your overall reading skills in the long-term also.
Reading through a huge pile of text books to find a bit of information to add to your project, for example, is hardly practical. Even if you had enough time to do all that reading, your eyes, as well as your brain, would probably explode at the end of it... not a pretty thought! This is where speed reading comes in. It simply involves scanning through the text, picking out important and relevant words.
First of all, decide what you are looking for in the text you're reading.
As you skim through the book, don't focus on every word, but group words together.
Don't move your lips or read the text aloud when you're reading. If you do this, then you'll be reading every word, which means you probably won't be speed reading!
Practice reading for only a few minutes at a time and gradually increase your time, especially if you find it difficult to concentrate when reading.
If you're having problems speed reading, there are many books available to help you quicken the pace of your reading. A small selection has been compiled below.
Just reading endless lines of text is not an effective way of learning from it. As with speed reading, decide what you want to get from the material.