Active reading is a method of reading a book with the intent of pulling something useful

out of it. It's different from passively going over the text once to experience it. Right

off the bat I'm going to say there were a lot of systems that have been put forward

like SQ3R, SQ4R, and lots of other acronym driven systems for active reading, and I think

that these systems are too cumbersome, they take too long, and I'm not going to be going

over them in this video. I'm not the only one who think this. Instead what I'm going

to do is show you how I'm applying active reading to 3 specific books that I've been

reading recently, and how I'm able to recall the information better by doing that. First

I'm going to give you 5 general active reading tips that you can apply to any reading that

you have to do. The first tip is to use a technique called pseudo-skimming.

The longer the readings that you have to do are, the more likely a lot of the paragraphs

in those readings are going to be filler. That could be background, that could be extra

detail, it could be asides. Things like that. Often you don't really need to read these

paragraphs all that in depth to get the information you need for your classes. The pseudo-skimming

technique is really a paragraph by paragraph technique where you skim each paragraph very

quickly, and then you get a feel for the reading and figure out which paragraphs hold the most

important information. The second tip is to try to read backwards. A lot of textbooks

are not all that exciting. They don't really have a narrative, and you're not going to

spoil yourself if you read it backwards, or go to the end.

If you want to figure out what a certain chapter is all about, you can first go to the back,

look at summary, look at the vocab lists that are put back there, some of the questions,

the review items, and get a feel for what the actual chapter wants you to learn in a

big sense, like a sky high sense. Once you get that you can start going backwards and

seeing, okay, yes. This vocab word was mentioned here. This graphic mentions a topic that was

in a review question, etc. Tip number 3 is to come up with questions while you read.

When you are going through the chapter, if you are doing pseudo-skimming, or anything

else, when something comes up that you don't really know about, then note that down as

a question. You can also use the headings, the sub-headings in the chapter as questions.

If there's a sub-heading that talks about a specific concept, you can re-word that as

a question, maybe even right it down in your notes, and then as you go through the actual

content of that section answer the question for yourself.

You can do this in review as well. Tip number 4 is to pay attention to the formatting of

a text. When I was in college I would do this with almost all of my readings. I would open

up the book, I would look at almost every single bolded item, or list of things, and

I would pay special attention to those items in the text because they probably were to

go over processes that are important to the chapter, or go over vocab terms that are almost

certainly going to appear on tests. Pay attention to things that stand out, and their formatting,

and not those down. My last tip before I get into some of the books I'm reading is to either

mark up the book while you're reading. If you own the book, you can write in it with

a pencil, and make notes in the margins, which is really helpful. If you don't, you can use

flags, or possibly highlight depending on your schools policies, and I'll show you that

in a bit. If you really don't want to mark up your book, then you can take really short

bulleted notes on a piece of paper. You can also put questions in there, or you

can take flow style notes. I'll throw some of my recent notes up on screen here. These

are notes I took in researching textbook reading strategies for these videos in this one, and

the last one. As you can see, I took notes on the things I was reading, actually for

multiple books, but it ended creating a better picture that I could come back to. It's in

my own words, it's in my own terms, so it makes for better recall. Those are my 5 tips,

and to round this video out, I'm going to show you a few of the books that I've been

reading, and 3 different active reading strategies that I adopted for each book. The first book

is, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. This book is about cognitive biases, it's

about bugs in human reasoning, and rationality, and decision making. It's a super dense book.

I've only gotten to page 145 as my little Ninetails will tell you. If you look at the

side of it, I've used flags to markup almost every page that I have read.

This is one of those books that's packed with information on almost every single page. Every

single chapter mention multiple studies with lots of results, defines different terms,

and I was interested in almost everything I was reading here, so as I went through I

used flags to markup the book in a non-damaging way. I was reading this book about a year

ago. I've become a little bit more okay with marking up my books permanently since then,

but the flag method does work, especially if you're renting textbooks, or you plan on

selling it later. You can pull them out when you need to when you have good notes for them,

and you finished reviewing. It's a pretty good method. The second book here is "Confessions

of a Scholarship Winner" by Kristina Ellis, and I'm going through this book because it's

a fantastic overview of how to win scholarships. Probably going to put it on my essential books

list and create a lot of blog posts, and things on it.

This book I went through with a pencil and I would bracket paragraphs that held specific

ideas I wanted to review later. I would write notes in the margin underlining specific terms

that are really important. As I'm looking back through the book I can see all the spots

that I wanted to note for later. I'm going to go through the book a second time once

I finish reading it, and take good notes on it. Speaking of notes, the book I've been

reading most recently is "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg. If you were to be able

to look through this book, you'll see no markings whatsoever. I actually have a third active

reading system which is working really, really well for me at this point, and it's just to

take notes on the chapter after I've read it. I've created a habit of reading this "Power

of Habit" ... I've created a habit of reading this book every single day for at least 15

minutes. I check it off in HabitRPG, and it's something

that's becoming a very strong habit for me, so I definitely do it every day. About once

every 2 days I finish a chapter. Immediately when I finish reading a chapter, I'll go over

to Evernote on my desktop computer, go back through the chapter and write notes in Evernote,

which you can see right now on the chapter. I've got a good bulleted summary of almost

the entire book right now. Everything that I thought was important in the book is in

that summary, and it's going to be about 3,000 words once I finish it, I'm estimating. That's

a lot less than what's in the book, and if I want to go back and review what I learned

it's going to be much easier, and it's in my own words as well. Those are some of the

strategies you can use for active reading. Hopefully you can implement some of these

into your studies in order to cut down on that study time, and increase your recall

and your ability to do better on tests, and essays, and whatever it is you need to apply

your readings to. If you want to get more videos on being an

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