By the end of this section, I hope you’ll be better-able to:

(1)       Track down in libraries things you need to read, quickly and efficiently.

(2)       Get quickly to the most relevant parts of the textbooks and other published material.

(3)       Use the time you spend reading as efficiently as possible.

(4)       Make useful learning tools as you read.

How much of what we read do we remember? Not a lot, I think. It would be a bit awkward if we remembered everything we saw in newspapers, on television screens, in books, and so on. We’d know so much that when it came to answering any question, we wouldn’t know where to start!

Reading can be a pleasurable activity. It can be relaxing, as well as stimulating. Reading something you’re not very interested in, however, can be boring and frustrating. Left to instinct, most of us tend to read rather passively. This is partly because we don’t usually expect an imminent quiz on what we’ve just read.

Many textbooks and other academic papers tend to be written in a rather remote and boring style. Much of the language is “third person passive”. Sentences tend to be long, and it’s often easy to grasp only part of the meaning of a sentence. Because main points are so often in the same size print as background detail, it’s often easier to remember the background detail, because that’s usually easier to understand. Main points may need to be read several times, and thought about, before they start getting home to us.

Because of all this, when reading for the purpose of learning, we need to consciously examine exactly how we are reading.
We need to do all we can to make reading an active process. We need to organise the way we go about our reading. Above all, we need to be selective in what we read.

What do you do? Do you wander round the shelves in the library, picking out books or journals which seem, from their titles, to contain the sort of information you’re looking for? It’s quite enjoyable doing this, but it’s a slow way of getting at information. There’s no guarantee that the most relevant-looking books will actually be the most useful. We may not be able to tell which authors are the most respected or up-to-date. The attractive, glossy-looking book may not be the best. In fact, the best books may not be on the shelves, being already out on loan.

Almost all libraries have catalogues. Sometimes these are on computer. Alternatively, card indexes of various sorts may be provided. It is often hard, at first, to use the catalogues efficiently, but library staff are usually only too pleased if you ask them for help in how to use the cataloguing systems. They’d much rather help you to find out how to use the library well, than if you were to ask them to find your books for you!

You’ll normally have quite a bit of guidance from your lecturers as to what books are most relevant. Many lecturers start their courses by giving out book lists. Don’t rush out and purchase all the books! If you buy them all, you’ll probably find you simply haven’t time to read them all, and in any case, some books will be much less useful than others. So it is important to get to know which books are going to be sufficiently relevant, and frequently-needed. These are the ones worth buying for yourself. It’s a good idea to ask students who have already done your course (and passed!) which books they found most useful. In fact, you may well be able to buy some of your books second-hand from students who have now finished with them.

Imagine you’ve tracked down a relevant textbook, and you’re about to use it to write an essay, or get to grips with one of your topics. What would you do?

Which of the following is closest to how you tend to start on your books?

(a) Scan quickly through the book, looking out for the parts relevant to your immediate purpose.

(b) Start on page one, and read through the book, trying to take in as much as you can all the way through.

(c) Look carefully at the content pages, and the index, and make more notes

Let’s assume, now, that you’ve found a relevant book, and tracked down the relevant information in it. Suppose you’re now in the business of studying the book, rather than just reading things in it.

What’s the main danger? It is reading page after page, and just as quickly forgetting all about what you’ve read. It’s quite easy to read something and understand it at the time, but it can be another matter to be able to recall, discuss, and apply the things you’ve just read.
Books tend to be longwinded. You can’t possibly “learn” all your books! So, you need to extract from the books things suitable for you to learn.

I’m not going to spell it all out here - because it’s simply a case of “making learning tools” as you read. My study skills guide on  “Making Learning Tools” explains how to use question-banks, summaries and mnemonics to help you learn what you need to. The important thing to decide is “what you need to learn’’ from each book. It won’t be the whole book.

You’ll soon pick up the skills of being able to track down which parts of a book particularly lend themselves to your purpose of making learning tools. For example, the summary at the end of a chapter may have quite enough detail in it for your purpose – you may only need to glance through most of the chapter itself.

As you can see, there’s quite a difference between reading-to-learn, and just reading. Reading for the sake of it is still one of your options, of course. The main thing is not to kid yourself that you’re actually doing productive work, if you’re reading passively. Passive reading is a luxury to be enjoyed when you know you’ve done sufficient work for the day!

To sum up, productive reading is an active process. You need pen and paper to make learning tools as you read. The question “do I need to remember this?” should be permanently in your mind when you read. Whenever the answer is “yes”, a question, or a summary, will help you to record what you need to remember, and give you the chance to test how much you remember.

(a)       It’s certainly a good idea to scan through a book, being careful not to get waylaid on things that you don’t need to read. However, it’s often quicker to get to the most relevant part by using the contents pages and index, to track down exactly where the most useful information is placed in the book.

(b)       It’s alright to start on page one, and plod on, if you’re reading a novel or a thriller. However, few textbooks are designed to be read cover to cover. Not everything will be relevant to your purposes. I’d suggest option (c) below is the most useful.

(c)        Well done, if this is your method. A lot of help can be derived from the contents pages. The titles of chapters can be very useful for homing in towards the information you need. If the sub-section titles are also listed, you can get a good idea of the logic of the relevant parts of the book from these. Then it’s useful to look relevant keywords up in the index, you can see if some of the things you’re interested in occur in other chapters besides the most relevant one.