Reading

Reading is an essential skill not only necessary to succeed in school, but also in day to day life. It is nearly impossible to go through a single day without being required to read something. Whether it is a sign, a newspaper, a letter, or a magazine, I find myself reading daily. Now that I am a college freshman, however, reading has switched roles from a leisurely activity to a requirement. Unfortunately, I now find myself reading things because I am required to, rather than because I want to relax. This is because after my reading assignments are completed, I usually have little interest in reading another sentence whether it be from "Glamour" or my Psychology textbook. In addition, reading a magazine and reading a textbook require very different methods. I find it is more difficult for me to retain information from an article written by Einstein than an article written by Britney Spears, simply because I am more interested in Britney Spear's life than physics.
Since I am less interested in textbook reading, I am often less focused on the content. However, if I find myself unable to remember content from a paragraph, I will go back and either reread the notes I took on that topic or reread the section. Note-taking is a very helpful tool I use both as a review technique and as a close-reading method. When I jot down quick notes about a section I am not required to remember important facts. This allows me to focus on reading the next section, not on attempting to remember something from the previous paragraph.
Note-taking while reading not only helps me understand what I am reading, while doing so, but helps refresh my memory about what I have read in the past. This makes note-taking an excellent review method. Another method of reading with a similar purpose is highlighting and flagging. I often keep a highlighter or set of flags by my reading area so that I can mark key words and facts that I predict will either be related to test questions or necessary to understanding the work as a whole. The fact that these techniques are necessary for me to understand writing in a textbook, make academic reading a very different process from leisurely reading.
When I read in my spare time, for fun, I often do not need any methods to help me retain information. I feel that this is because when I read in my extra time, I read works that are of interest to me and do so for pure enjoyment, solely. When I read a magazine article I often skip sentences to reach the "guts" of the article that holds the most interesting and important information needed to understand the point of the article as a whole. Once I reach the section of the article that interests me, I often feel that I have a grasp of the entire section and usually move to the next article. Unfortunately, textbook reading requires much more concentration and effort in order to understand a topic.
Whether it be a textbook or magazine, reading is definetely a requirement for life in 2009. I am hopeful that I will continue to reap the benefits of thethe reading techniques I developed in the past. If I find that using the highlighter, flagging, notetaking, and rereading techniques are still not enabling me to comprehend what I am reading, I will need to develop additional techniques. I know that with the help of my professors I will be able to succeed no matter how much I seem to struggle with reading comprehension.