Reading skills are necessary for all, be it a school going kid, a graduate student or a professional. Here are some tips to improve your reading skills.
- Ensure that you are in an optimized environment for reading. Make sure that there are fewer distractions. Make sure to have a comfortable chair and table.
Know why you are reading, whether for entertainment or for learning something. Once you understand the purpose of reading, you will enjoy reading and also improve comprehension. - Before reading, have a glance or scan. Just look at the table of contents, index, topic headers, photo captions, etc. By this, you can know what the content includes and also you’ll find if you are interested in the reading or not. Scanning is very helpful to find the desired topic in a book. You can just read the introduction or preface of a book, the first or last paragraphs of a chapter, or the concluding chapter of a book to scan.
- Skimming is required for getting the gist of something. For instance, when reading a newspaper, you go through the main points and skip over the detail. So, when deciding if a book in the library is right for you, use skimming.
- Detailed reading is generally done to extract information accurately. It needs attention as you have to focus on the topic in deep. Use dictionary to get the meanings. So, prioritize the purpose of your reading.
- Certain key things should be remembered during active reading, underlining and highlighting, noting key words, noting questions for which you need answers, and also creating summaries for the parts you read.
- If you want to improve your reading speed, check your rate in words-per-minute. Practicing daily for 15 to 30 minutes can help you improve the speed.
Make sure that you follow these tips daily to improve your reading skills. However, never forget to practice regularly.