Follow the Text with Your Cursor!
One of the biggest challenges of Reading Comprehension is staying engaged. It is necessary to come up with tricks to keep your mind focused on the text. One tip to improve engagement is to follow the text with your cursor. This will keep your reading pace consistent while also improving the speed at which you are able to read the passage.
Be Active, Not Passive
The goal in Reading Comprehension is not to memorize every detail of the passage. Instead, we are trying to pick out important pieces that quickly help us see the forest through the trees. When analyzing a passage, our brains should be focused on identifying function first and foremost. That means we should be asking ourselves why each sentence is there rather than concerning ourselves with the exact detail of what each sentence is saying.
While our minds are at work, we should pursue a highlighting strategy that best helps identify main concepts. One notation method you might want to try is highlighting just two ideas: main point sentences and author-opinion words. The objective of this strategy is to boil down our passage to its most important pieces while giving our brain strong visual indicators. We can immediately identify a lengthy highlighted portion as a main point and an individual word highlight as an opinion word from the author.
Ultimately, there are many viable methods of both reading the passage and analyzing its content. To find what is right for you, experiment! Try this and other strategies to find out what best helps you see the forest through the trees.
To see how our 7Sage tutors tackle Reading Comprehension, check out the free sample of our live class archive!