Regardless of what type of expository text , any non-fiction text that aims to educate the reader, you are assigned to read, your primary comprehension goal is to identify the main point: the most important idea that the writer wants to communicate and often states early on. Finding the main point gives you a framework to organize the details presented in the reading and relate the reading to concepts you learned in class or through other reading assignments.

You should go through what you read and try to answer the questions you noted before during the pre-reading stage. Check in after every section, chapter or topic to make sure you understand the material and can explain it, in your own words. Pretend you are responsible for teaching this section to someone else. Can you do it?   It’s at this stage that you consolidate knowledge, so refrain from moving on until you can recall the core information.

to reflect and to encode the information. Using these strategies is brain-friendly, and they will help you remember what you’ve read so that you can retrieve the information when you need it again for a class discussion, a test, or an application in your daily life.

When reading to learn, also called study reading, it is never enough to sit back with your reading material, move your eyes across page after page until you’ve reached the end of your assignment, and expect to remember what you just read, let alone actually learn what you needed to or were expected to from the reading. Therefore, you need to be an active reader.

Now that you have planned your approach to accomplishing the reading assignment and invested 5-10 minutes in pre-reading, how will you make sure you actually understand (comprehend) all the information? Some of your reading assignments will be fairly straightforward. Others, however, will be longer or more complex, so you will need a plan for how to handle them.

The third planning strategy is setting a purpose for your reading. Knowing what you want to achieve from a reading assignment not only helps you determine how to approach that task, but it also helps you stay focused during those moments when you are up late, already tired, or unmotivated because relaxing in front of the television sounds far more appealing than curling up with a stack of journal articles. Sometimes your purpose is simple. You might just need to understand the reading material well enough to discuss it intelligently in class the next day. However, your purpose will often go beyond that. For instance, you might also need to read in order to compare two texts, to formulate a personal response to a text, or to gather ideas for future research.

The third planning strategy is setting a purpose for your reading. Knowing what you want to achieve from a reading assignment not only helps you determine how to approach that task, but it also helps you stay focused during those moments when you are up late, already tired, or unmotivated because relaxing in front of the television sounds far more appealing than curling up with a stack of journal articles. Sometimes your purpose is simple. You might just need to understand the reading material well enough to discuss it intelligently in class the next day. However, your purpose will often go beyond that. For instance, you might also need to read in order to compare two texts, to formulate a personal response to a text, or to gather ideas for future research.

Managing your time – Now that you know how many sections make up the entire reading assignment, focus on setting aside enough time for reading and breaking the assignment into manageable chunks. For example, if you are assigned a seventy-page chapter to read for next week’s class, it is best not to wait until the night before to get started. How you choose to break up the reading assignment will depend on the type of reading it is. If the text is dense and packed with unfamiliar terms and concepts, you may need to read no more than five or ten pages in one sitting so that you can truly understand and process the information. With more user-friendly texts, you will be able to handle more pages in one sitting. And if you have a highly engaging reading assignment, such as a novel you cannot put down, you may be able to read lengthy passages in one sitting.

Most of your writing assignments—from brief response papers to in-depth research projects—will depend on your understanding of course reading assignments or related readings you do on your own. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to write effectively about a text that you do not understand. Even when you do understand the reading, it can be hard to write about it if you do not feel personally engaged with the ideas discussed.