Reading Tips: Myth-Folklore

The reading quiz each week is there to give you feedback about how much you retained from the reading. You need to get at least a 70% on one of your quiz attempts to be able to do the storytelling and essay blog posts for the week. Ideally, you should get 80% or better on all your quiz attempts  - 80%, 90%, 100% - they are all good; if you get 80% or better, you are ready to move on and there is no reason at all to take the quiz again. Meanwhile, if you did not get a 70% or better, that is an indication that something went very wrong when you were doing the reading. Below are some tips that can help you retain more from what you read, and you can find some more tips for good reading here.

1. Give yourself time. If you do the reading in haste, it will be difficult to retain anything. You need to give yourself time. Each week, the reading consists of approximately 20,000 words. If you were to read it out loud (which is ideal for retaining the content; see below), it would take you two hours.

2. Read the guide information at the top and bottom of each page. At the top of each page there are explanatory notes that will help you with the meaning of the story. At the bottom of each page there are questions to help make sure you are ready to go on to the next page. If you are not able to answer the questions at the bottom of the page, that means you need to read the page again, more carefully this time, BEFORE you click the blue arrow to go on to the next page.

3. Take notes. Taking notes is essential! You can do that by hand on a piece of paper or by typing your notes in a text file. If you take notes on each story, you will find it easy to do the quiz and you will also have a great head start in writing your own story for the week. GoogleDocs is great for this; just open it in a different browser window, side by side the with reading - don't open it in a different tab, but instead resize your browser window and open two windows side by side, so you can see the reading and your notes window at the same time. 

4. Read; don't skim. If you try to skim the reading, it will not work. Stories are not like the kind of writing you might find in a textbook or article. You cannot skim for the "main idea," reading the topic sentence of each paragraph.  Instead, you need to read each sentence carefully, keeping track of the characters and the plot sentence by sentence.

5. Read out loud. If you find yourself unable to stop from just skimming the material, then read it out loud. Reading out loud is a great way to enjoy the story, and you will definitely retain much more of what you read if you read it out loud.

6. Slow down. Another way you can try to force yourself to slow down is to enlarge the font. The instructions for this vary between operating systems; most browsers have a keyboard shortcut for "zoom in" and "zoom out." Using a larger font can help to slow you down as you read. 

7. Focus. Shut down other applications on your computer while you do the reading. If you get automatic social networking messages in your browser, for example, then simply use a different browser to do the reading; you can download Firefox or Chrome just to vary your browser routine. If you have a plain browser which you have not customized with lots of plug-ins and notifications, you might find it easier to maintain your focus.

8. Use a dictionary. Some of the words are highlighted with links to an online dictionary. In addition, GoogleDocs has an excellent dictionary. So, if you have GoogleDocs open in an adjacent browser window, you can use it as a handy look-up dictionary tool for any words you don't recognize. If you are interested in building your vocabulary (for example, if you are taking the GRE, LSAT, etc. this semester), use that GoogleDoc to keep track of the words you look up!