Improving Reading Skill

Oleh Salsa Ghina Butsaina, 1806203553, Bahasa Inggris Keperawatan I Kelas D

Improving reading skills help you to survive in the university because you
will be forced to read every single thing to complete your task since you can’t copy
and paste. This time, I will put some advice to improve your reading skills
especially for uni materials, it would be general advice and advanced advice.

This general advice might be too obvious but it depends on the person,
sometimes it works and sometimes not. First, choose your best place. It could be in
a quiet library or comfy room but don’t read in bed for uni materials. Do it on your
best mood and time. While you read, make sure you take a break like every 30
minute to drink or relaxing your body and eyes. Next, don’t mumble while you read
because it will destroy your concentration easily. Before you start reading, set a
goal, perhaps read 5 pages or 1 chapter.

Now, I am going to give an advanced advice. First, set timer because the
amount of time you use to read can help you to spend your time efficiently if you
practice a lot. Then, you choose the text. Seek the up-to-date text by checking the
publication. Read the summary behind the book or inside the book. Find the topic
you need in the index. This part wants you to find the best references you will read,
if it doesn’t relevant to the topic you need, find another reference. Second, do
scanning. Scanning is a technique that you move your eyes quickly to find the
relevant word or phrases to your task. Scanning may allow you to read up to 1500
word a minute. You could scan the preface, the first or last paragraph of the
chapters, the summary of the text, and the index.

After do scanning, you do skimming. Just like scanning, skimming is a fast

reading technique but the purpose of skimming is to find the general meaning. You
have to be super concentrate on identifying the main point. You may skim titles,
subheading, words in bold, italics or underlined, diagrams, abstract, introduction,
conclution, first or last sentence of every paragraph, summaries. Once you got the
information, you can start to read in detail. Take a note to help you read. You use
underlining and highlighting on your own book, keyword, question, and summaries.
That technique makes you more active and increase your level of concentration and
understanding. If you find it hard to make a note, you could make a mind mapping,
a technique that presentate a hierarchical information that have main idea with
branches of related topics.

All in all, we can understand how easy improving reading skill. It isn’t the
book fault for having a lot of pages but it is our lack of reading skill that made us
take a super long time to understand the text.

Reference:

University of Leicester. 2009. Improving your reading skills. Retrieved from

https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/study-guides-pdfs/study-skills-
pdfs/improving-reading-v0.1.pdf

The University of Melbourne. 2010. Helpsheet: READING SKILLS. Retrieved from

https://www.jmu.edu/valleyscholars/files/studyreadingskills.pdf