Steps on how to READ articles better

In my previous blog “Steps to write articles for better memory retention â€œ, I talk about a few points on what a writer can do to allow readers to remember the points better.

Now, it is the other way round – what the reader can do to improve his reading.

Have you ever read some articles where you feel that you will never be able to finish scrolling down the whole article because it is way too lengthy? And if you were referring to articles you’d saved before, just to realize you have to re-read the whole article to refer to some points you intend to find?

Most of the time, description and examples form up the main bulk of those lengthy articles. Let me state clearly, description and examples ARE good. They help to convince and explain the writer’s point of view. And I am not saying writers who publish long articles are lousy. It’s just personal choice of reading “short-and-sweet” articles rather than long articles.

But of course, there are some exceptions where I do take the time and effort to slowly read through long articles. The reason I do that is because there are long articles that sustain my interest throughout the whole reading process. In addition, sometimes I am very interested how the writer tries to convey his message across and how does he or she substantiate the ideas. This way, I can learn the writing method and apply in my own articles.

So you might be asking – How do you read long articles?

Ø   Speed reading

Ø   Make Notes

Ø   Personal interpretation

Speed reading

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I would briefly scan through the whole article by reading the introductory paragraph, topic headlines, first and last two lines of long paragraphs and the concluding paragraph.

This is to get the main picture of the article. Yes, I bound to miss out some important points in the article. Feel free to skim through the whole article one more time.

Take Notes

Now comes the tedious part of making notes. There should be one main point in each paragraph. Open up a notepad or Microsoft word, copy and paste the sentence you feel is the gist of the whole paragraph. Skip those paragraphs which you think that they are just only descriptions and examples. Do this for the whole article and you should take around 5seconds for each paragraph.

Personal Interpretation

The thinking process – this is where you make your brain work and allows you to remember better.

For each point/sentence you copied, type out YOUR OWN interpretation of that point. You may want to copy a sentence of two of description or examples from the article to help you understand the point better.

For example, for a point “getting more connections”, I may put “add more contacts in my social networking sites like APSense etc.”

Once you are done, you have YOUR OWN notes and summary of the article! Now you can leave that long article aside and refer to your own notes for further reference.

Don’t worry. It’s time consuming and frustrating in the beginning, but you will get the hang of it. In no time, you can master these simple steps to better your reading skills.

How to remember these 3 points? Just remember these are “Smart Marketers’ Preferences”

~Speed reading

~Making notes

~Personal interpretation

James Kong