Hey, what's up?
It's Thomas Frank, and in this video we're talking about active reading.
Active reading is a method of reading a book with the intent of pulling something useful
out of it.
It's different from passively going over the text once to experience it.
Right off the bat I'm going to say there were a lot of systems that have been put forward
like SQ3R, SQ4R, and lots of other acronym driven systems for active reading, and I think
that these systems are too cumbersome, they take too long, and I'm not going to be going
over them in this video.
I'm not the only one who think this.
Instead what I'm going to do is show you how I'm applying active reading to 3 specific
books that I've been reading recently, and how I'm able to recall the information better
by doing that.
First I'm going to give you 5 general active reading tips that you can apply to any reading
that you have to do.
The first tip is to use a technique called pseudo-skimming.
The longer the readings that you have to do are, the more likely a lot of the paragraphs
in those readings are going to be filler.
That could be background, that could be extra detail, it could be asides.
Things like that.
Often you don't really need to read these paragraphs all that in depth to get the information
you need for your classes.
The pseudo-skimming technique is really a paragraph by paragraph technique where you
skim each paragraph very quickly, and then you get a feel for the reading and figure
out which paragraphs hold the most important information.
The second tip is to try to read backwards.
A lot of textbooks are not all that exciting.
They don't really have a narrative, and you're not going to spoil yourself if you read it
backwards, or go to the end.
If you want to figure out what a certain chapter is all about, you can first go to the back,
look at summary, look at the vocab lists that are put back there, some of the questions,
the review items, and get a feel for what the actual chapter wants you to learn in a
big sense, like a sky high sense.
Once you get that you can start going backwards and seeing, okay, yes.
This vocab word was mentioned here.
This graphic mentions a topic that was in a review question, etc.
Tip number 3 is to come up with questions while you read.
When you are going through the chapter, if you are doing pseudo-skimming, or anything
else, when something comes up that you don't really know about, then note that down as
a question.
You can also use the headings, the sub-headings in the chapter as questions.
If there's a sub-heading that talks about a specific concept, you can re-word that as
a question, maybe even right it down in your notes, and then as you go through the actual
content of that section answer the question for yourself.
You can do this in review as well.
Tip number 4 is to pay attention to the formatting of a text.
When I was in college I would do this with almost all of my readings.
I would open up the book, I would look at almost every single bolded item, or list of
things, and I would pay special attention to those items in the text because they probably
were to go over processes that are important to the chapter, or go over vocab terms that
are almost certainly going to appear on tests.
Pay attention to things that stand out, and their formatting, and not those down.
My last tip before I get into some of the books I'm reading is to either mark up the
book while you're reading.
If you own the book, you can write in it with a pencil, and make notes in the margins, which
is really helpful.
If you don't, you can use flags, or possibly highlight depending on your schools policies,
and I'll show you that in a bit.
If you really don't want to mark up your book, then you can take really short bulleted notes
on a piece of paper.
You can also put questions in there, or you can take flow style notes.
I'll throw some of my recent notes up on screen here.
These are notes I took in researching textbook reading strategies for these videos in this
one, and the last one.
As you can see, I took notes on the things I was reading, actually for multiple books,
but it ended creating a better picture that I could come back to.
It's in my own words, it's in my own terms, so it makes for better recall.
Those are my 5 tips, and to round this video out, I'm going to show you a few of the books
that I've been reading, and 3 different active reading strategies that I adopted for each
book.
The first book is, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.
This book is about cognitive biases, it's about bugs in human reasoning, and rationality,
and decision making.
It's a super dense book.
I've only gotten to page 145 as my little Ninetails will tell you.
If you look at the side of it, I've used flags to markup almost every page that I have read.
This is one of those books that's packed with information on almost every single page.
Every single chapter mention multiple studies with lots of results, defines different terms,
and I was interested in almost everything I was reading here, so as I went through I
used flags to markup the book in a non-damaging way.
I was reading this book about a year ago.
I've become a little bit more okay with marking up my books permanently since then, but the
flag method does work, especially if you're renting textbooks, or you plan on selling
it later.
You can pull them out when you need to when you have good notes for them, and you finished
reviewing.
It's a pretty good method.
The second book here is "Confessions of a Scholarship Winner" by Kristina Ellis, and
I'm going through this book because it's a fantastic overview of how to win scholarships.
Probably going to put it on my essential books list and create a lot of blog posts, and things
on it.
This book I went through with a pencil and I would bracket paragraphs that held specific
ideas I wanted to review later.
I would write notes in the margin underlining specific terms that are really important.
As I'm looking back through the book I can see all the spots that I wanted to note for
later.
I'm going to go through the book a second time once I finish reading it, and take good
notes on it.
Speaking of notes, the book I've been reading most recently is "The Power of Habit" by Charles
Duhigg.
If you were to be able to look through this book, you'll see no markings whatsoever.
I actually have a third active reading system which is working really, really well for me
at this point, and it's just to take notes on the chapter after I've read it.
I've created a habit of reading this "Power of Habit" ... I've created a habit of reading
this book every single day for at least 15 minutes.
I check it off in HabitRPG, and it's something that's becoming a very strong habit for me,
so I definitely do it every day.
About once every 2 days I finish a chapter.
Immediately when I finish reading a chapter, I'll go over to Evernote on my desktop computer,
go back through the chapter and write notes in Evernote, which you can see right now on
the chapter.
I've got a good bulleted summary of almost the entire book right now.
Everything that I thought was important in the book is in that summary, and it's going
to be about 3,000 words once I finish it, I'm estimating.
That's a lot less than what's in the book, and if I want to go back and review what I
learned it's going to be much easier, and it's in my own words as well.
Those are some of the strategies you can use for active reading.
Hopefully you can implement some of these into your studies in order to cut down on
that study time, and increase your recall and your ability to do better on tests, and
essays, and whatever it is you need to apply your readings to.
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