How to Improve My Reading Comprehension Skills

Reading comprehension skills help you in many different ares of life.

Reading comprehension skills are very important. No matter what you enjoy reading the most - newspapers, magazine articles, online articles, novels, poems, short stories, or nonfiction books - if you feel like you are having difficulty understanding and/or retaining information from what you are reading, you may be interested in improving your reading comprehension skills.

Instructions

1. Slow down. When you read slowly and carefully, and you really allow yourself to linger over the words on the page or screen in front of you, it becomes easier to remember, comprehend, and process the content of what you are reading. People who are in the habit of reading very quickly tend to skip over entire chunks of their reading material, and when you skip over whole sentences, this can interfere with your overall comprehension of what you are reading.

2. Read the most difficult sections of your reading material more than once. If a particular paragraph or sentence of an article or book is difficult to understand, take the time to read this troublesome section twice (or three times or more), until you feel like the meaning of that particular section of the text is really "sinking in," and you are truly understanding it.

3. After reading two or three pages of a book or long article, give yourself a little informal "reading comprehension quiz." Try to summarize in writing (or just in your mind) exactly what transpired in the two to three pages you just read. For instance, if you are reading a novel, sum up the major plot points of the past three pages. You may even want to write down these plot points as brief bullet points in a notepad.

4. If your mind tends to wander, or if you feel easily distracted during reading, you may have already realized that this tendency can interfere (sometimes rather significantly) with your overall reading comprehension. Whenever you feel your mind starting to wander, gently redirect yourself back to focusing on the text in front of you.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider reading aloud as yet another effective way to improve your reading comprehension skills. Indeed, quite a few people find that the absolute best way for them to understand and retain information from a difficult paragraph or section of text is to read the words out loud, perhaps even using tonal shifts and inflections when appropriate.