8 Must Read Steps To Improve Reading Skills

Reading comprehension poses difficulty for many people. To develop and improve reading skills need time, practice and perseverance. Nowadays many useful gadgets for frequent readers are available in the market like kindle tab, E-book, etc. which have huge memory to store a lot of information and reading material which helps in developing reading skills. Improving your reading skills is similar to assembling furniture, step by step.

Just as the furniture comes with a manual to help assemble it, the same way this article is a complete guide to “How to improve your reading skills”. This will help you learn reading with easy to follow strategies and techniques. Improving your reading skill will lead to saving time in comprehending the text and it will improve your focus as well.

How to Improve Reading Skills

In order to read efficiently and effectively, one must follow the following 8 steps:

Objective of Reading

First and foremost step in the direction of attaining improved and focused reading skills is identifying the objective of reading. One must determine, what purpose one is reading for? If you are reading to obtain knowledge or information in order to finish your school work, assignments or language learning, then you need extensive technique and if your aim reading for mind, for example enhancing your vocabulary, improve pronunciation or learn grammar, in this case, you need intensive technique.

• Extensive Reading Technique – as the name suggests, reading at length or reading as much material as possible over the topic. This makes you exposed to a wide range of ideas, vocabulary and grammatical structure required to finish your assignment or gain fluency in any language.

• Intensive Reading Technique- This approach involves reading the short text closely, making notes and doing other exercises such as finding specific words, question-answer based on the text, summarising the text in own words, etc. This helps in understating the meaning of the text deeply, the language’s grammar and syntax.

Style of Reading

In everyday life, we use different styles of reading for different texts, for example we read novel in detail, going through each line and word so that we don’t miss anything, while reading magazine we leaf through pages to see if any article catch our attention and when we read telephone directory we avoid all other text and just focus on the information we need. These different reading styles can be easily applied your studies depending upon the requirement and nature of the text.

Selecting The Text 

The text needs to be evaluated in order to ascertain whether it contains relevant information to achieve the objective of reading. Recently updated information is always up-to-date and useful, one must be careful of the date when the text is last updated. Reading the table of contents gives an idea of relevant chapters, reading writers note in the beginning and at the end also give an idea whether the book has required information or not. Once you select the relevant text, the next step involves examining or scrutinizing the text for detailed reading.

Scrutinizing The Selected Text 

This technique is basically used to pick a familiar word or phrase which is relevant to your current task by scanning quickly the selected text. You can quickly scan through the introduction or prologue of the chapter, first or last paragraph, conclusion or summary at the end of the chapter. It helps in making the reading of relevant material more precise and it saves time.

Skimming The Text  

It further helps in cutting down the irrelevant text. It refers to quickly moving your eyes over the lines of the text to get an idea of the main points. It gives a quick preview of selected text before going in detailed reading and it makes easier to understand the meaning of the selected text when reading the second time in detail.

Reading in Detail and Jotting Down the Notes 

After selecting and further scrutinizing the text, you can start reading it in detail. To make reading more focused, you can make use of highlighter so when you come across a keyword or phrase you can highlight it. It helps in remembering central or main words or phrases. Form questions for short texts, it will help you comprehend the text better and also helpful in follow up work. In order to ensure you fully understand the meaning of the text, summarise it in your own words. Then skim over the text once more to check the accuracy of your summary and it helps in filling the gaps in your summary.

Reading With a Friend

You can opt for reading with your friend, as it will further help in not just understanding the text but also exchange of ideas, that will lead to focusing on the minor details that might have got skipped while reading alone. Reading with a friend makes reading interesting and easy. Forming questions and then discussing answers with each other help in refining the thought process and helps in remembering facts.

Re-reading 

re-reading always gives a better understanding of the text. Reading the second or third time helps in identifying the points you skip the first time. Every time you re-read a text, you are able to answer the questions, based on the text, better.

Conclusion

To improve reading skills, one must be clear in mind what purpose he or she is reading for? At the same time, certain issues related to reading must be addressed too such as distraction, boredom, the right technique of reading, etc. To oneself from distraction, one must find a place where they have less material around to distract them like T.V or phone, etc. to avoid boredom one must develop an interest in the topic by discussing the same with other and learning about their perspective. 

But most important of all is, following the right techniques always help in improving the reading skills. Starting from setting the objective for your reading followed by picking a style to read depending upon the nature and purpose of reading, further scanning and skimming of text pick more relevant and accurate information from the text, highlighting the keywords and phrases, forming questions based on the selected text and finally summering the text in your own words helps to improve your reading skills in a great way.

Lisa Allen, an assistant writer at EssayCorp, is an MBA degree holder from the St. George University with years of experience in the academic field. The company where I'm working provides various assignment writing services to high school and college students.