Active Reading Strategies

1.  Understand your reading situation/purpose

  • Know whether you 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

  • Free write about the title
  • Speculate
  • Write questions
  • Say what you think you know about the subject
  • Wonder
  • Make predictions
  • Guess the argument

3.  Preview the reading to get a sense of it as a whole

  • Scan the reading – pay attention to topic sentences, and the beginnings and ends of paragraphs
  • Uncover the writer’s writing situation/motivation for writing
  • Look for and mark segment breaks (“chunks”)
  • Read pull quotes or text boxes
  • Look for learning outcomes or objectives
  • Look at headings 
  • Look at illustrations
  • Circle the names of writers and the titles of the texts used in the reading
  • Find concepts/keywords and work to understand how they connect
  • Write questions
  • Find out where the essay “goes”  or what it gets to at the end

4.  Read and annotate

  • Look for and mark segment breaks (“chunks”)
  • Identify the purpose and main idea of each segment
  • Write the gist of each paragraph/segment in the margins
  • Notice and define keywords/concepts; identify words that you need to understand better
  • Learn to distinguish concept language from example language
  • Connect concepts to examples
  • Come up with examples or counter-examples of your own
  • Write margin comments explaining how you agree, disagree, or both with points 
  • Pay attention to signpost language, pivot words, transitions, voice markers, and signal phrases
  • Pay particular attention to beginnings and ends of paragraphs and paragraph sequences
  • Notice who is saying what in response to whom for what purpose
  • Write the questions that occur to you as you read in the margins
  • 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
  • Make notes of ideas and questions that occur to you as you read

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 one-paragraph response to the writer’s argument in which you build on, extend, apply, critique or dissent from his or her view