Reading Strategies and RememberingWhat You Read

The cardinal rule of reading literature is not to actually read literature, at least not in the traditional sense. This chapter proposes a more efficient method for reading and skimming literature. Learning to skim literature is one of the most valuable skills. The chapter provides general guidelines to decide whether to skim or read literature. Scholarly literature is relatively predictable in terms of how information is organized within a text. Additionally, the reader can take advantage of the fact that the first and last sentences of each paragraph typically hold the most powerful and most important textual information. The chapter presents some strategies to combat the tendency to read a paragraph or page without comprehending or retaining that information. An annotated bibliography is a repository of the literature that is read and skimmed. Students typically prefer to capture annotated bibliographies in word processing or spreadsheet software programs.