Reading Critically

Reading requires skills that have to be learned, and college-level reading requires additional skills. In college, you are expected to read and understand what you read. But what exactly is reading? Reading is learning. It’s intentional and active, a task that requires focus and attention. It’s contextual—it’s two-way communication between an author and reader. It involves understanding and interpreting, thinking and reflecting, and making connections between previous experiences and learning.

Critical reading is a complex thinking technique that involves discovering and taking apart an author’s meaning, evaluating the author’s meanings based on established standards, and incorporating the meaning into the ideas you already know. Critical reading is more complicated than reading done for pleasure, which is why college reading is more difficult and takes more time than pleasure reading. Critical readers employ strategies including identifying the authors’ ideas even when they’re not stated directly, recognizing patterns, questioning, prioritizing ideas, and identifying and evaluating arguments, as well as creating new arguments.

A Framework for Critical Reading

Actively reading academic texts can be challenging for students used to reading for entertainment alone, but practicing the following steps will get you up to speed:

• Preview
• Read
• Summarize
• Review

Preview

Previewing reading assignments helps you think about your purpose for reading before you start to read. It also helps you connect new content to what you already know, making it easier to stay interested and focused on the reading.

Here’s a list of questions to ask yourself before you start to read:

• Why did my professor assign this? What do they want me to get out of this?
• What do I need to do with this information after I read it?
• What’s this text about?
• What do I already know about it?
• What questions do I have that this text might answer?

You can start to formulate answers before you even begin reading. For example, if you are assigned a nonfiction book, read the title, the back of the book, and table of contents. Scanning this information can give you an initial idea of what you’ll be reading and some useful context for thinking about it.

You can also preview a text by skimming it. Skimming means reading through quickly, skipping details, and focusing on the title of the chapter and, when available, the introduction, main headings, sub-headings, and summary.

Read

You have previewed the reading assignment. Now you are ready to begin reading. It’s easy to fool yourself about reading. Having an open book in your hand, moving your eyes across a page—none of that necessarily means that you are reading effectively. Reading takes mental focus. As you read, be conscious of where you are and what you are doing.

To begin, avoid marathon reading sessions. Schedule breaks, and set a reasonable goal for the entire session. Then, reward yourself with an enjoyable activity for 10 or 15 minutes every hour or two.

For difficult reading, set more limited goals. Read for a half-hour and then take a break. Most students find that shorter periods of reading distributed throughout the day and week can be more effective than long sessions.

As you read an academic text, you should take notes by hand or using the annotation features of software such as Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, or Hypothes.is. Circle or highlight key concepts. Write down questions or comments. This will help you remember what you are reading and also build a personal connection with the subject matter.

Summarize

After you read an academic text, it’s worth taking the time to write a short summary—even if your instructor doesn’t require it. The exercise of jotting down a few sentences or a short paragraph capturing the main ideas of the reading is enormously beneficial: it not only helps you understand and absorb what you read but gives you ready study and review materials for exams and other writing assignments.

Review

It always helps to revisit what you’ve read for a quick refresher. It may not be practical to thoroughly reread assignments from start to finish, but before class discussions or tests, it’s a good idea to skim through them to identify the main points, reread any notes at the ends of chapters, and review any summaries you’ve written.

Additional Strategies for Critical Reading

In college it’s not uncommon to experience frustration with reading assignments from time to time. Because you’re doing more reading on your own outside the classroom, and with less frequent contact with instructors than you had in high school, it’s possible you’ll encounter readings that contain unfamiliar vocabulary or don’t readily make sense. Different disciplines and subjects have different writing conventions and styles, and it can take some practice to get to know them. For example, scientific articles follow a very particular format and typically contain the following sections: an abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. If you are used to reading literary works, such as graphic novels or poetry, it can be disorienting to encounter these new forms of writing.

Below are some additional strategies for making different kinds of texts more approachable.

Get to Know the Conventions

Academic texts, like scientific studies and journal articles, may have sections that are new to you. If you’re not sure what an “abstract” is, research it online or ask your instructor. Understanding the meaning and purpose of such conventions is not only helpful for reading comprehension but for writing, too.

Look up and Keep Track of Unfamiliar Terms and Phrases

Have a tab open for the Merriam-Webster dictionary when you read complex academic texts, so you can look up the meaning of unfamiliar words and terms. Many textbooks also contain glossaries or “key terms” sections at the ends of chapters or the end of the book. If you can’t find the words you’re looking for in a standard dictionary, you may need one specially written for a particular discipline. For example, a medical dictionary would be a good resource for a course in anatomy and physiology.

If you circle or underline terms and phrases that appear repeatedly, you’ll have a visual reminder to review and learn them. Repetition helps to lock in these new words and their meaning into long-term memory, so the more you review them, the more you’ll understand and feel comfortable using them.

Look for Main Ideas and Themes

As a college student, you are not expected to understand every single word or idea presented in a reading, especially if you haven’t discussed it in class yet. However, you will get more out of discussions and feel more confident about asking questions if you can identify the main idea or thesis in a reading. The thesis statement can often (but not always) be found in the introductory paragraph, and it may be introduced with a phrase like “In this essay I argue that…” Getting a handle on the overall reason an author wrote something (“to prove X” or “to explore Y,” for instance) gives you a framework for understanding more of the details. It’s also useful to keep track of any themes you notice in the writing. A theme may be a recurring idea, word, or image that strikes you as interesting or important: “This story is about men working in a gloomy factory, but the author keeps mentioning birds and bats and windows. Why is that?”

Look for Reputable Online Sources

Professors tend to assign reading from reputable print and online sources, so you can feel comfortable referencing such sources in class and for writing assignments. If you are looking for online sources independently, however, devote some time and energy to critically evaluating the quality of the source before spending time reading any resources you find there. Find out what you can about the author (if one is listed), the website, and any affiliated sponsors it may have. Check that the information is current and accurate against similar information on other pages. Depending on what you are researching, sites that end in “.edu” (indicating an “education” site such as a college, university, or other academic institution) may be more reliable than “.com” sites.

Pay Attention to Visual Information

Images in textbooks or journals usually contain valuable information to help you more deeply grasp a topic. Graphs and charts, for instance, help show the relationship between different kinds of information or data—how a population changes over time, how a virus spreads through a population, etc.

Data-rich graphics can take longer to “read” than the text around them because they present a lot of information in a condensed form. Give yourself plenty of time to study these items, as they often provide new and lasting insights.

Vocabulary-Building Techniques

Gaining confidence with unique terminology used in different disciplines can help you be more successful in your courses and in college generally. In addition to the suggestions described earlier, such as looking up unfamiliar words in dictionaries, the following are additional vocabulary-building techniques for you to try.

Read Everything and Read Often

Reading frequently both in and out of the classroom will help strengthen your vocabulary. Whenever you read a book, magazine, newspaper, blog, or any other resource, keep a running list of words you don’t know. Look up the words as you encounter them and try to incorporate them into your own speaking and writing.

Make Connections to Words You Already Know

Sometimes you can look at a new word and guess the definition based on similar words whose meaning you know. For example, if you are reading a biology book on the human body and come across the word malignant, you might guess that this word means something negative if you already know the word malfunction, which shares the “mal-” prefix.

Make Index Cards

If you are studying certain words for a test, or you know that certain phrases will be used frequently in a course or field, try making flashcards for review. For each key term, write the word on one side of an index card and the definition on the other. Drill yourself, and then ask your friends to help quiz you.