Seven Tips for Effective Reading as a College Student

The ability to read well is an essential skill in college. Reading assignments are numerous regardless of major and being able to read well is strongly connected to the ability to write well. Sometimes professors will skip topics in lecture and say "read your book." Being able to comprehend written works after only one or two readings saves time. Understanding readings can also allow a college student to respond to them more deftly and with more precision in essays. In short, reading well is important in college. In this article, I intend to describe six things that college students can do to read more effectively.

College Reading Tip #1 - Start Reading Early

Reading in college is much easier if you give yourself as much time as possible. For example, trying to read an entire chapter of a dense biology text a day before the corresponding lecture will be difficult and time-consuming. It's not necessary to read an entire college textbook as soon as a course syllabus is received, but making sure that readings are completed a few days in advance will allow you to actually read assignments instead of just skimming them.

College Reading Tip #2 - Skim

Wait, isn't skimming bad? No, skimming is actually good. However, skimming is best in conjunction with reading, not by itself. A good way to read is to skim the article, chapter, or reading that you are assigned while noting important vocabulary, concepts, and opinions first, then read, then skim again to review. At the end of this, you should have a better grasp on the material than you would if you just read the assignment, and you have spent only ten or fifteen more minutes on task. College readings are dense, so reviewing material multiple times helps a lot.

Can skimming ever replace reading at college? Typically, no. Skimming is better than not doing a reading assignment if you are out of time and discussion is part of your course grade. It's also better to skim unstudied material than to make blind guesses on a test. However, I would like to share an experience in which I should have skimmed readings.

I had to take a course that focused on the Conquest of Latin America. Our professor would give us multiple readings for every lecture. Often, a single reading would be thirty to forty pages long and written in undecipherable academic terms. I would spend hours every week reading these articles and retaining nothing. At no point in the course were we evaluated on our understanding of the readings and our professor would spend lectures going through the main points of each reading anyway. I wasted a ton of time doing readings for this course. This was time in which I could have studied, done other homework, or relaxed. If you experience anything similar to this, consider skimming instead of reading.

College Reading Tip #3 - Understand Vocabulary

Often, if you don't understand vocabulary in a reading, you are wasting your time doing the reading. For example, if you don't know what individuation is, you might be completely lost in a reading for a Developmental Psychology course. When you come across unfamiliar vocabulary (and you will), make sure you look it up and learn it. If you have to, write the definition on a notecard and keep it nearby. Everyone, whether a foreign language student or a math major, needs to do this if he or she wants to succeed.

College Reading Tip #4 - Take Notes

I mentioned not being able to retain information from the readings from my Hispanic Civilizations course. Something I should have done was to take notes. I underlined quotes, highlighted things I considered to be important, and wrote thoughts in the margin. This was better than doing nothing, but it's good to jot down notes on a separate sheet of paper or to type thoughts in a new document. This forces a college student to mull over his or her thoughts and phrase them as a sentence. "Not good for indigenous people" is much more vague than "The indigenous people of Brazil suffered socially and economically after the Portuguese established a slave trade in the region." It might take more time to write or type notes this way, but if an exam, essay, or course grade is dependent on your understanding of readings, notes can be indispensible. It is also much faster to read ten pages of concise notes than to read sixty pages of repetitive academic writing in small print, and well-written notes can act as a backbone for future essays.

College Reading Tip #5 - Know When to Stop

I've written a lot about wasting time in this article. One of the biggest ways that college students waste their time is through reading late at night or for extended periods of time. Most people have an attention span of fifteen or thirty minutes. If you find that you're getting bored during a reading, stop for a while. Thinking about other things, wanting to get a drink, or having to go to the bathroom won't help you focus on or absorb the material you're trying to learn. It's better to be mentally fresh while doing readings than to force yourself to "finish" and retain only the first few pages that you looked at. If this means that you have to limit yourself to twenty or thirty minutes of reading at a time, so be it. Just make sure that you're focused during these periods of time and not distracted by a cell phone or Facebook. If you know that it takes you a long time to get through a reading, start earlier.

College Reading Tip #6 - Have a Discussion Buddy

After completing reading assignments, different people will sometimes have different understandings or interpretations of the material. For this reason, it is beneficial for you to find someone else with whom you can discuss reading assignments outside of class. You may find that you both shed light on different aspects of a reading, or you may notice gaps in your understanding of complicated material. College is more about the ability to work in groups than most people realize. With respect to reading, it's no different.

College Reading Tip #7 - Read for Pleasure

There's been a lot written about speed reading over the years, but the only real way to read faster and still absorb material is to read more. Reading faster will allow you to complete assignments more quickly and less painfully. Likewise, reading outside of class will expose you to new concepts and ideas, and may help you become a more well-rounded individual. It can be difficult to find time to read while at college. If you're extremely pressed for time, try to read one or two short stories every week. This should be manageable.

The ability to read well in college is essential. If you cannot read well, you're at a severe disadvantage in many courses. However, following the above tips should help you to read more effectively and understand the material more quickly. Have any further suggestions for how college students can read more effectively? Feel free to share your thoughts in the form of a comment. Thanks for reading!