by Kate

There is tons to read in college, truckloads of textbooks.  Much of it so dry and coma-inspiring that its hard to get through.  I’m not a lazy reader, one of my greatest pleasures in life is reading.  But its easy to get overwhelmed with so many un-read chapters before you.

In grade school there was a brief trend to teach speed reading, one of the few lessons of value I got from public school.  I have always loved to read and would find any excuse to read rather than do chores or my homework, so practice came naturally to me.

While I performed relatively poorly through high school (primarily due to my anarchist attitude), I found that later in college I had one distinct advantage over my peers: I was a fast reader.

The sheer volume of volumes that college tried to bury us in threatened to drown many a co-ed swimmer.  College students are assigned a sea of pages to read and “know”.  I was as absurdly negligent as the average student about big-time procrastination: waiting until the last minute to actually “do” the reading.

But, you know, once I got around to it, I read faster than they did and seemed to remember more.  (This of course is a severe case of “do as I say, not as I did”, but procrastination is deeply entrenched in the college world and unlikely to be un-rooted by me here).  Here are a few tips to enhance your reading speed and increase how much you remember. You will have made some progress, and a little bit better is better than none, as we like to say at my house.

Skip the boring parts.Really, I mean it.  Focus on the sections that seem to be most relevant and the words that you need.  Its okay to skip the fillers and go for the keywords.  Let your eyes “drift” over a line of print with instructions from your brain to stop and give you a second to digest the parts that matter.  You will know ahead of time what sorts of words you need to pay attention to, depending what topic you are studying.  If you are in the habit of nodding off over your books you are probably reading every word and trying to memorize it as you go.  Knock it off!  No, sleeping with your head on your text book will not allow you to learn through magical osmosis!

Interact with your book. This will help keep you alert and avoid that trance-like state where the eyes keep moving but the brain no-comprende.  Keep a pen in hand and notebook near and jot down any little notes as you go.  Just one-word phrases or dates is fine.  If you look over these notes later, that could be good.  But even if you don’t look at them again, somehow it seems that by running a bit of that info that you soaked up through your eyes, past your brain and down your fingers and pen and onto the page, you’ve made it a bit more permanent in your memory.

Skim it. Skimming gets a bad rap.  Before you begin, check the Table of Contents, headings and titles to give you an idea of where your most needed information lies and zoom in on that.  You’ve gone through the relevant text already, focusing on key words and concepts, perhaps stopping here and there to read more deeply, and taken a few notes.  The morning of your test, spend even five minutes very quickly reading it again, and you will have much better re-call.