1.1 Reading and Writing in College
Planning Your Reading
Have you ever stayed up all night cramming just before an exam? Or found yourself skimming a detailed memo from your boss five minutes before a crucial meeting? The first step in handling college reading successfully is planning. This involves managing your time and setting a clear purpose for your reading.
Managing Your Reading Time
Focus on setting aside enough time for reading and breaking your assignments into manageable chunks. If you are assigned a seventy-page chapter to read for next week’s class, try not to wait until the night before to get started. Give yourself at least a few days, and tackle one section at a time.
Your method for breaking up the assignment depends on the reading type. If the text is very dense and packed with unfamiliar terms and concepts, you may need to read no more than five or ten pages in one sitting to understand and process the information truly. You can handle longer sections with more user-friendly texts—twenty to forty pages, for instance. And if you have a highly engaging reading assignment, such as a novel you cannot put down, you may be able to read lengthy passages in one sitting.
As the semester progresses, you will better understand how much time you need to allow for the reading assignments in different subjects. It also makes sense to preview each assignment in advance to assess its difficulty level and determine how much reading time to set aside.
