Study Skills Hack created by 301 Academic Skills Centre.
You will be faced with a lot of reading on your course, including long reading lists with lots of dense and complex texts on them. Faced with so much information to get through, how do you even begin to read it all? There is a simple answer: you don’t need to. So, faced with a new text, where do you start?
- It might seem obvious, but read the title first.
- Next, check the date of publication. Is it recent? Has it been superseded by other research?
- Now look at the contents, or abstract if there is one.
- If you still need to read on, look through the sub-headings and look at any pictures, charts or diagrams.
- Next, you might want to read the introduction in full, followed by the conclusion.
- If you want to scan the main body of the text, look at the first sentence of each paragraph.
- Now look at the bibliography - are there other relevant texts on there that you can use for your own review of the literature?
- By now you will have a good idea of the content of the text. Do you need to look in more detail at some or all of it? If it seems important, now is the time to read it in more detail.
- Based on your scan-read, set yourself some key questions to answer and read the text in full, taking notes and answering your questions as you go.
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