Before, During, and After Active Reading Strategies

Improve comprehension, retention, and ability to use and respond to readings

Before Reading Activities

1.  Understand your reading situation/purpose

Know whether you’re reading to master a topic for a test, to learn a skill, to find a piece of information, to encounter diverse viewpoints, to respond in discussion or writing, or for some other purpose.

Adjust your reading speed and focus accordingly.

2. Activate your knowledge/create expectations

  • Read the abstract to identify the topic, hypothesis, problem, or question, methods, findings, and implications of the reading
  • Find the keywords list to identify important concepts
  • Free write about the title
  • Write down anything you think you know about the subject
  • Speculate, wonder, make predictions
  • Guess the argument
  • Write questions you want answered in the reading
  • Set reading goals
    • what do you want to learn?
    • what do you need to know?
    • why does this matter for your work?

3.  Preview the reading to get a sense of it as a whole and to figure out how the piece is structured

  • Re-read the abstract
  • Find the keywords list and guess how they connect
  • Uncover the writer’s writing situation/motivation for writing – to what gap in the literature are they responding?
  • Scan the reading – pay attention to topic sentences and the beginnings and ends of paragraphs to get a sense of subtopics, how the argument evolves, and what meaning the writer is making from the concepts, data, and explanations presented
  • Look for and mark segment breaks (“chunks”)
  • Read featured pull quotes or text boxes
  • Look for learning outcomes or objectives (if the reading is a textbook chapter)
  • Look at headings to find keywords and the structure of the article
  • Find concepts/keywords not in the keywords list and guess how they connect
  • Look at illustrations, tables, and graphs – visuals provide crucial evidence, highlight trends, and summarize detailed data, allowing for quicker analysis and deeper understanding of the material
  • Circle the names of writers and the titles of the texts used in the reading – writers of research articles always write within and to a professional community of peers and in response to existing literature. You need to know whose ideas they are borrowing, whose ideas they are responding to, and how the article you’re reading fits in with others
  • Add to the questions you want answered
  • Find out where the essay “goes” or what points it gets to at the end, so that when you’re reading more carefully, you can understand how each segment leads to the end

During Reading Activities

4.  Read and annotate

  • Look for and mark segment breaks (“chunks” or “paragraph sequences”)
  • Identify the purpose and main idea of each segment and write them down
  • Write the gist of each paragraph/segment in the margins
  • Discover the reading’s word bank:
    • Notice and define keywords/concepts; identify words that you need to understand better
    • Look for patterns of exactly repeated words and their variants
    • Look for structuring binaries: good/evil, better/worse,
  • Learn to distinguish concept language from example language
  • Connect concepts to examples
  • Come up with examples or counterexamples of your own
  • Talk back to the text: write margin comments explaining how you agree, disagree, or both with points 
  • Pay attention to signpost language, pivot words, transitions, voice markers and other evaluative language, and signal phrases
  • Pay particular attention to the beginnings and ends of paragraphs and paragraph sequences
  • Notice how the writer is using and responding to sources written by other writers: identify who is saying what in response to whom for what purpose
  • Write the questions that occur to you as you read in the margins
  • Make connections
    • Connect earlier parts of the essay to later parts of the essay
    • Connect ideas to your own experiences or experiences of others
    • Connect ideas to other texts you’ve read
  • Simply complex sentences by identifying the main clause and paraphrasing it in your own words before understanding how the other clauses affect the meaning
  • Make notes of ideas and questions that occur to you as you read

After Reading Activities

5.  Summarize and respond

  • Write a one-paragraph summary of the writer’s argument (focus on the sequence of claims and qualifications of claims, not on the supporting evidence)
  • Write a few paragraphs that record
    • What you learned
    • Why it matters
      • to you
      • to the topic or questions or adjacent topics and questions
      • to the field of study or profession
      • The strengths and weaknesses of the reading
      • What new questions or insights you have as a result of reading this piece