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IMPROVE YOUR READING

SIXTH EDITION

Ron Fry

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CONTENTS

Foreword: Read On!

Chapter 1: The Basis of All Study Skills

Chapter 2: Reading with Purpose

Chapter 3: Finding the Main Idea

Chapter 4: Gathering the Facts

Chapter 5: The Challenge of Technical Texts

Chapter 6: Becoming a Critical Reader

Chapter 7: Reading the Literature

Chapter 8: Focusing Your Mind

Chapter 9: Retaining the Information

Chapter 10: Let’s Read Up on ADD

Chapter 11: Build Your Own Library

Chapter 12: Reading: A Lifelong Activity

Index

FOREWORD
READ ON!

A number of you are students, not just the high school students I always thought were my readers, but also college students making up for study skills you may have lacked in high school, and middle school students trying to master these study skills early in your educational career to maximize your opportunities for success.

If you’re a high school student, you should be particularly comfortable with both the language and format of this book—its relatively short sentences and paragraphs, occasionally humorous (hopefully) headings and subheadings, and a reasonable but certainly not outrageous vocabulary. I wrote it with you in mind!

If you’re a middle school student, I doubt you’ll have trouble with the concepts or language in this book. Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade is the perfect time to learn the different ways to read and the methods to better retain whatever you’re reading. You’re probably just discovering that The Babysitter’s Club series is not what your parents or teachers had in mind when they encouraged you to read “the classics.”

And if you are a “traditional” college student, age 18 to 25, I would have hoped that you had already mastered most, if not all, of the basic study skills, especially reading and writing. Since you haven’t, please make learning, using, and mastering all of the study skills covered in my How to Study Program an absolute priority.

Do not pass “Go.” Do not go on a date. Take the time to learn these skills now. You may have been able to kid yourself that mediocre or even poor reading skills didn’t stop you from finishing, perhaps even succeeding in, high school. I guarantee you will not be able to kid anyone in college. You must master all of the skills in this book to survive, let alone succeed.

If You Finished School Long Ago

Many of you reading this are adults. Some of you are returning to school, and some of you are long out of school but have figured out that if you can learn now the study skills your teachers never taught you, you’ll do better in your careers—especially if you are able to read what you need to faster…and retain it better and longer.

All too many of you are parents with the same lament: “How do I get Johnny to do better in school? He thinks the Sunday comics are the height of literature.”

Your child’s school is probably doing little, if anything, to teach him or her how to study, which means he or she is not learning how to learn. And that means he or she is not learning how to succeed.

Should the schools be accomplishing that? Absolutely. We ought to be getting more for our money than a diploma, some football cheers, and a rotten entry-level job market.

What Can Parents Do?

Okay, here they are, the rules for parents of students of any age:

1. Set up a homework area. Free of distraction, well lit, with all necessary supplies handy.

2. Set up a homework routine. When and where it gets done. Studies have clearly shown that students who establish a regular routine are better organized and, as a result, more successful.

3. Set homework priorities. Actually, just make the point that homework is the priority—before a date, before TV, before going out to play, whatever.

4. Make reading a habit—for them, certainly, but also for yourselves. Kids will inevitably do what you do, not what you say (even if you say not to do what you do).

5. Turn off the TV. Or at the very least, severely limit when and how much TV-watching is appropriate. This may be the toughest suggestion to enforce. I know. I was once the parent of a teenager.

6. Talk to the teachers. Find out what your kids are supposed to be learning. If you don’t know the books they’re supposed to be reading, what’s expected of them in class, and how much homework they should be scheduling, you can’t really give them the help they need.

7. Encourage and motivate, but don’t nag them to do their homework. It doesn’t work. The more you insist, the quicker they will tune you out.

8. Supervise their work, but don’t fall into the trap of doing their homework. Checking (i.e., proofreading) a paper, for example, is a positive way to help your child in school. But if you simply put in corrections without your child learning from her mistakes, you’re not helping her at all…except in the belief that she is not responsible for her own work.

9. Praise them when they succeed, but don’t overpraise them for mediocre work. Kids know when you’re being insincere and, again, will quickly tune you out.

10. Convince them of reality. (This is for older students.) Okay, I’ll admit it’s almost as much of a stretch as turning off the TV, but learning and believing that the real world will not care about their grades, but will measure them by what they know and what they can do, is a lesson that will save many tears (probably yours). It’s probably never too early to (carefully) let your boy or girl genius get the message that life is not fair.

11. If you can afford it, get your kid(s) a computer and all the software they can handle. There really is no avoiding it: Your kids, whatever their ages, absolutely must be computer-savvy in order to survive in and after school.

12. Turn off the TV already!

13. Get wired. The Internet is the greatest invention of our age and an unbelievable tool for students of any age. It is impossible for a college student to succeed without the ability to surf online in this age of technology. They’ve got to be connected.

14. But turn off IM (Instant Messaging) while doing homework. They will attempt to convince you that they can write a term paper, do their geometry homework, and IM their friends at the same time. Parents who believe this have also been persuaded that the best study area is in front of the TV.

The Importance of Your Involvement

Don’t for a minute underestimate the importance of your commitment to your child’s success: Your involvement in your child’s education is absolutely essential to his or her eventual success. The results of every study done in the last two decades about what affects a child’s success in school demonstrate that only one factor overwhelmingly affects it, every time: parental involvement—not the size of the school, the money spent per pupil, the number of language labs, how many of the students go on to college, how many great teachers there are (or lousy ones). All factors, yes. But none as significant as the effect you can have.

You can help tremendously, even if you were not a great student yourself, even if you never learned great study skills. You can learn now with your child—it will help her in school, and it will help you on the job, whatever your field.

If You’re a Nontraditional Student

If you’re going back to high school, college, or graduate school at age 25, 45, 65, or 85—you probably need the help these books offer more than anyone! As much as I emphasize that it’s rarely too early to learn good study habits, I must also emphasize that it’s never too late.

If you’re returning to school and attempting to carry even a partial load of courses while simultaneously holding down a job, raising a family, or both, there are some particular problems you face that you probably didn’t the first time you were in school:

Time and money pressures. Let’s face it: When all you had to worry about was going to school, it was easier than going to school, raising a family, and working for a living simultaneously.

Self-imposed fears of inadequacy. You may well convince yourself that you’re just “out of practice” with all this school stuff. You don’t even remember what to do with a highlighter! While some of this fear is valid, most is not.

The valid part is that you are returning to an academic atmosphere, one that you may not have visited for a decade or two. And it is different (which I’ll discuss more next) than the “work-a-day” world. That’s just a matter of adjustment and—trust me—it will take a matter of days, if not hours, to dissipate.

I suspect what many of you are really fearing is that you just aren’t in that school “mentality” anymore, that you don’t “think” the same way. Or, perhaps more pertinent to this book, that the skills you need to succeed in school are rusty.

I think these last fears are groundless. You’ve been out there thinking and doing for quite a few years, perhaps very successfully, so it’s really ridiculous to think school will be so different. It won’t be. Relax. And while you may think your study skills are rusty, as we discussed earlier, you’ve probably been using them every day in your career. Even if I can’t convince you, you have my How to Study Program as your refresher course. It will probably teach you more about studying than you ever forgot you knew.

Maybe you’re worried because you didn’t exactly light up the academic world the first time around. Well, neither did Edison or Einstein or a host of other successful people. But then, you’ve changed rather significantly since then, haven’t you? Concentrate on how much more qualified you are for school now than you were then!

Feeling you’re “out of your element.” This is a slightly different fear, the fear that you just don’t fit in any more. After all, you’re not 18 again. But then, neither are fully half the college students on campuses today. That’s right: Fully 50 percent of all college students are older than 25. The reality is, you’ll probably feel more in your element now than you did the first time around!

You’ll see teachers differently. Probably a plus. It’s doubtful you’ll have the same awe you did the first time around. At worst, you’ll consider teachers your equals. At best, you’ll consider them younger and not necessarily as successful or experienced as you are. In either event, you probably won’t be quite as ready to treat your college professors as if they were minor deities.

There are differences in academic life. It’s slower than the “real” world, and you may well be moving significantly faster than its normal pace. When you were 18, an afternoon without classes meant a game of Frisbee. Now it might mean catching up on a week’s worth of errands, cooking (and freezing) a week’s worth of dinners, and/or writing four reports due this week. Despite your own hectic schedule, do not expect campus life to accelerate in response. You will have to get used to people and systems with far less interest in speed.

Some Random Thoughts About Learning

Learning shouldn’t be painful and certainly doesn’t have to be boring, though it’s far too often both. It’s not necessarily going to be wonderful and painless, either. Sometimes you actually have to work hard to figure something out or get a project done. That is reality.

It’s also reality that everything isn’t readily apparent or easily understandable. That’s okay. You will learn how to get past the confusion. Heck, if you actually think you’re supposed to understand everything you read the first time through, you’re kidding yourself. Learning something slowly doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It may be a subject that virtually everybody learns slowly. A good student just takes his time, follows a reasonable plan, and remains confident that the lightbulb of understanding will eventually click on.

Parents often ask me, “How can I motivate my teenager?” My initial response is usually to smile and say, “If I knew the answer to that question, I would have retired very wealthy quite some time ago.” I think there is an answer, but it’s not something parents can do—it’s something the student has to decide: Are you going to spend the school day interested and alert or bored and resentful?

It’s really that simple. Since you have to go to school anyway, why not develop the attitude that you might as well be active and learn as much as possible instead of being miserable? The difference between a C and an A or B for many students is, I firmly believe, merely a matter of wanting to do better. As I constantly stress in radio and TV interviews, inevitably you will leave school. And very quickly, you’ll discover all anyone really cares about is what you know and what you can do. Grades won’t count anymore; neither will tests. So you can learn it all now or regret it later.

How many times have you said to yourself, “I don’t know why I’m bothering trying to learn this calculus (algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry, history, whatever). I’ll never use this again!”? The truth is, you have no clue what you’re going to need to know tomorrow or next week, let alone next year or in a decade.

I’ve been amazed in my own life how things I did with no specific purpose in mind (except probably to earn money or meet a girl) turned out years later to be not just invaluable to my life or career, but essential. How was I to know when I took German as my language elective in high school that the most important international trade show in book publishing was in Frankfurt, Germany? Or that the basic skills I learned one year working for an accountant (while I was writing my first book) would become essential when I later started four companies? Or how important basic math skills would be in selling and negotiating over the years? (Okay, I’ll admit it: I haven’t used a differential equation in 20 years, but, hey, you never know!)

So learn it all. And don’t be surprised if the subject you’d vote “least likely to ever be useful” winds up being the key to your fame and fortune.

There Aren’t Many Study Rules

Though I immodestly maintain that my How to Study Program is the most helpful to the most people, there are certainly plenty of other purported study books out there.

Inevitably, these other books promote the authors’ “system,” which usually means what they did to get through school. This “system,” whether basic and traditional or wildly quirky, may or may not work for you. So what do you do if “their” way of taking notes makes no sense to you? Or you master their highfalutin’ “Super Student Study Symbols” and still get Cs?

There are very few “rights” and “wrongs” out there in the study world. There’s certainly no single “right” way to attack a multiple choice test or take notes. So don’t get fooled into thinking there is, especially if what you’re doing seems to be working for you.

Needless to say, don’t read my books looking for that single, inestimable system of “rules” that will work for everyone. You won’t find it, ’cause there’s no such bird. You will find a plethora of techniques, tips, tricks, gimmicks, and what-have-you, some or all of which may work for you, some of which won’t. Pick and choose, change and adapt, figure out what works for you. Because you are the one responsible for creating your study system, not me.

I’ve used the phrase “Study smarter, not harder” as a sort of catch phrase in promotion and publicity for the How to Study Program for two decades. So what does it mean to you? Does it mean I guarantee you’ll spend less time studying? Or that the least amount of time is best? Or that studying isn’t ever supposed to be difficult?

Hardly. It does mean that studying inefficiently is wasting time that could be spent doing other (okay, probably more fun) things and that getting your studying done as quickly and efficiently as possible is a realistic, worthy, and attainable goal. I’m no stranger to hard work, but I’m not a monastic dropout who thrives on self-flagellation. I try not to work harder than I have to!

It’s a Hard-Wired World

In 1988, when I wrote the first edition of How to Study, I composed it, formatted it, and printed it on (gasp) a personal computer. Most people did not have a computer, let alone a neighborhood network and DSL, or surf the Internet, or chat online, or Instant Message their friends, or read hundreds of books on a Kindle, or…you get the point.

Those days are very dead and gone. And you should cheer, even if you aren’t sure what DOS was (is? could be?). Because the spread of the personal computer and, even more important, the Internet, has taken studying from the Dark Ages to the Info Age in merely a decade.

As a result, you will find all of my books assume you have a computer and know how to use it—for note taking, reading, writing papers, researching, and much more. There are many tasks that may be harder on a computer—and I’ll point them out—but don’t believe for a second that a computer won’t help you tremendously, whatever your age, whatever your grades.

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