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Active Reading Strategies
- Commit to understanding the reading on its own terms first rather than reacting to or judging it
- Commit to being conversant with a text (becoming familiar enough with the text to talk about it with some nuance without notes) rather than being satisfied with just getting the gist
- Break complex texts up into smaller chunks
- Mark up your texts – circles, lines, arrows, squiggles, boxes, emojis, !?, comments, definitions
- Focus on individual sentences and short passages first, read sentences aloud and notice the particular words the sentence is composed of, then build your understanding from the pieces you’ve focused on by putting them in conversation with one another
- Work with passages that you find interesting, strange, or revealing
- Summarize as you go – in your own words | Paraphrase x 3
- Look for structural cues to enable you to divide complex texts into parts and understand the relationships among the parts
- Locate and define concepts and concept-clusters; describe the relationship between concepts and examples.
- Look for explicit and implicit binaries – pairs of words or details that are opposites: ex: independent/dependent; emotion/reason.
- Find patterns of repetition and similarity; name the patterns and explain why they matter; look for anomalies that don’t fit the patterns you’re finding
- Make the implicit explicit by asking “So what?”
- Uncover assumptions – if the author writes X, what must they think, believe, or value to have written that?
- Look for the questions or imperatives driving the text rather than just the answers
- Make connections – text-to-self, text-to-world, text-to-text
- Make a glossary of unfamiliar words
