Reading strategies

DIFFERENT KINDS OF TEXTS, SERVING DIFFERENT PURPOSES, REQUIRE DIFFERENT READING STRATEGIES

The following are the most commonly used strategies for reading scientific texts:

A. SKIMMING - This involves:

1. Reading through the opening section until you have some idea of what the writer's thesis is — what he's out to reveal or prove. Usually the first paragraph will be enough, but some­times the writer doesn't get down to his actual thesis until after a few introductory paragraphs. If this seems to be the case, glance over the introductory section and only begin reading carefully after the writer actually gets down to the issue he's presently concerned with. Then when you feel you know what his thesis is, you can start to «skim» rapidly through the rest of the text.

2. Glancing over the rest of the text, paragraph by para­graph, trying to locate the key sentence within each paragraph and to follow the writer's train of thought (to follow his argu­ment). If you get lost (if you find that you no longer know what he's talking about) backtrack a bit and try to find out where you got lost and what new idea he introduced at that point (you may have missed it because it was in the middle of a paragraph, and not at the beginning or end, where new ideas are most commonly introduced).

3. Reading through the closing section to see if you actually did understand the thesis in the opening section (which, pre­sumably, you were able to follow by glancing through the body of the text). The conclusion usually refers back to the opening and confirms the thesis presented there, sometimes summariz­ing the important material in the body of the text which was meant to support the thesis.

B. SCANNING

This involves glancing over the individual lines of the text, looking for specific pieces of information (names, dates, sub­titles, a key sentence introducing a specific idea you're par­ticularly interested in, the place in the text where one section ends and a new idea is introduced, etc.)

C. READING INTENSIVELY

Once you know which parts of the text contain the infor­mation you're particularly interested in, you can concentrate on reading those parts with special care, weighing each word to make sure that you haven't misunderstood or missed anything the writer communicated either directly (explicitly) or indi­rectly (implicitly). Look up the words you don't understand in a good dictionary. If you're not sure you understood exactly what the writer means, go back to see if the preceding context is helpful. If that doesn't help, read ahead to see if what fol­lows clarifies for you.

Exercise:

The following list includes various kinds of texts. Decide which of the three strategies — or which combination of them, and in what order — would be suitable for each:

1. a menu

2. a page in the dictionary

3. a road map

4. a diagram in a scientific article

5. an article in a scientific journal reporting on the research of someone in your field whose work you admire

6. an article in «Time» or «Newsweek»

7. a caption under a photograph

8. a page in the telephone book

9. an advertisement for something you're thinking of buying

10. a label on a food package

11. instructions for the use of a new appliance

12. the note included in the box of a prescription drug giving active ingredients, dosage, side effects, storage instruc­tions, etc.

13. a book on your course bibliography

14. a poem

15. a short story

16. a novel

17. a set of classroom notes borrowed from your friend before the final exam in a course you have seldom attended

18. an article written by a professor whose course you're taking