How to read a book
The purpose of reading things like this is to gain, and retain, information. Your main goal is finding out what happens as quickly and easily as possible . This is how you’ll get the most out of a book in the smallest amount of time.
1. Read the whole book
In reading to learn, your goal should always be to get all the way through the assignment. In fact, no matter how carefully you read, you won’t remember most of the details anyway. You should remember and record the main points. And if you remember those, you know enough to find the material again if you ever do need to recall the details.
2. Decide how much time you will spend
Setting time limits and keeping to them is one of the most important skills you can learn. You should plan before start to read .
3. Have a purpose and a strategy
As soon as you start to read, trying to find out four things
• Who is the author?
• What are the book’s arguments?
• What is the evidence that supports these?
• What are the book’s conclusions?
Then,you start trying to determine
• What are the weaknesses of these arguments, evidence, and conclusions?
• What do you think about the arguments, evidence, and conclusions?
• How does (or how could) the author respond to these weaknesses, and to your own criticisms?
If you finish,keep coming back to these questions as you read.you should be able to answer them all.
• Imagine that you’re going to review the book for a magazine.
• Imagine that you’re having a conversation, or a formal debate, with the author.
• Imagine an examination on the book. What would the questions be, and how would you answer them?
4. Read actively
Generate hypotheses Ex .the main point of the book is .. and questions about the book. Making short notes about these can help. As you read, try to confirm your hypotheses and answer your questions. Once you finish, review these.
5. Read it three times
This is the key technique. You’ll get the most out of the book if you read it three times — each time for a different purpose.
a) Overview: discovery (5-10 percent of total time) Here you read very quickly, Your goal is to discover the book. You want a quick-and-dirty, without reading carefully You should generate questions to answer on your second reading.
b) Detail: understanding (70-80 percent of total time) read the book a second time.Your goal is understanding: to get a careful, critical, thoughtful grasp of the key points. Focus especially on the beginnings and ends of chapters and major sections. Try to answer any questions you generated on the first round.
c) Notes: recall and note-taking (10-20 percent of total time) final reading is to commit to memory the most important elements of the book. Make brief notes about the arguments, evidence, and conclusions. This is not at all the same thing as text markup; your goal here is to process the material by translating into your own mental framework, which means using your own words as much as possible.
6. Focus on the parts with high information content
the book have each chapter,each section within a chapter ,each paragraph, front and back covers, Table of contents ,Index: scan this to see which are the most important terms , conclusion , pictures, graphs, tables
7. Use PTML
re-read unimportant information. As a rule, you should average no more than two or three short marks per page. Rather than underline whole sentences, underline words or short phrases that capture what you most need to remember. The point of this is to distill, reduce, eliminate the unnecessary. Write words and phrases in the margins that tell you what paragraphs or sections are about. Use your own words.
8. Page vs. screen
Printed material has far higher resolution than even the best computer screens For this reason you will read more accurately, and with less fatigue, if you stick with the paper version. Still, we inevitably read much more screen-based material now.
9. Know the author(s) and their organizations
Knowing who wrote a book helps you judge about the book’s quality. Authors are people. The more you know about the author and his/her organization, the better you will be able to evaluate what you read. Try to answer questions like these: What factors shaped the author’s intellectual perspective? What is his or her profession? You can often learn about much of this from the acknowledgments, the bibliography, and the author’s biographical statement.
10. Know the intellectual context.
Knowing the author and his/her organization also helps you understand the book’s intellectual context. You’ll understand a book much better if you can figure out what, and who, it is answering since a book is almost always partly one writer’s response to other writers. Pay special attention to points where the author tells you directly.
11. Use your unconscious mind
You should read a book in several short sessions of one to two hours apiece, rather than one long marathon. In between, your unconscious mind will process some of what you’ve read. When you come back for the next session, start by asking yourself what you remember from your previous reading, what you think of it so far, and what you still need to learn.
12. Rehearse, and use multiple modes
Reading is exactly like martial arts. So after you’ve read the book, rehearse what you’ve learned. Quiz yourself on its contents. Argue with the author. Imagine how you would defend the author’s position in your own writing. talk about the book with others. Bring it up in classes. Write about it. Visualize anything that can be visualized about its contents. All of this helps fix your memory and integrate your new learning into the rest of your knowledge.