Reading to Understand

Regardless of your motivation for reading, your main goal is to understand the information you read. The first step in the reading process is to prepare yourself to understand what you will read. You can prepare yourself physically and mentally.

You can prepare physically by sitting comfortably, reading in a well-lit area, limiting distractions, and keeping a pen and paper close by. You can prepare mentally by clarifying why you are reading, deciding how you will read, and starting with a positive attitude.

Clarifying your purpose for reading

Your purpose for reading will help you to decide how you will read. If your purpose is to learn the dates of events, you will read anything with dates very carefully. You might make some notes as well. If your purpose for reading is to evaluate a writer’s style, you will pay attention to the choice of words, variety of sentences, and organization of paragraphs. Perhaps your reason for reading is to learn new facts, to have new experiences, to experience another person’s thoughts or feelings, to be entertained, to find the main idea, to summarise the information later, to retell the information to other people, to improve your reading speed, to increase your vocabulary, or to criticize the ideas.