Speeding Up Your Reading, or, how to fake having read a bookand understand it better than if you had plodded

through it! Tips from an Anonymous Friend. 1. First look carefully at the Table of Contents; this tells you what topics are coveredwhat the author considers most important. It tells you about the order of coverage, revealing how the author thinks about the logical sequence of analysis. Often the chapter titles refer to major concepts or ideas in the book. 2. Look at the introduction and conclusion for a summary of the authors purpose and perspective. 3. Look for design elements in the text that help you understand its main ideas: highlighted key terms and their definition; chapter summaries or conclusions that identify main ideas; chapter titles and section headings within chapters; pictures and graphs. 4. Read the book in a hierarchical order, focusing on main ideas while subordinating examples and other yada, yada stuff. Everything in the book is not equally important. 5. Read the conclusions of all the chapters of the whole book first. If these are not clear to you, read the corresponding chapter sections carefully. 6. Skim the book to locate key concepts that tip off the theoretical and/or ideological/political orientation of the bookmarxist, conservative, feminist, liberal, etc.or a theoretical orientation in your field. Once you have identified a books perspective, a lot of the analysis will probably be fairly predictable. 7. Skim the book three or four times, in slightly different ways each time, rather than reading it cover to cover from beginning to end. Read the beginnings and ends of chapters and the topic sentences of paragraphs. Later you can return to the rest of the material for a closer reading. 8. As you read: VISUALIZEmake pictures to illustrate your reading; TRANSLATE CONCEPTS AND IDEAS INTO YOUR OWN WORDS; ASK QUESTIONS OF THE AUTHORS AND GET INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH THEM. CHALLENGE THE AUTHORS AND HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH THEM. 9. Recording your reading: Make an outline of the chapters and the book as a whole, recording main ideas and a few examples; try to sum up main ideas in a time-line, chart, diagram, etc; use a highlighter only for key concepts and main ideasdont highlight everything. 10. Most authors write too much. What would this book look like if it were turned into an article? A one-page abstract? What is the essence of the argument? If you begin your reading with these methods, you will not have the feeling oh, no. I am on page 1 and I have so many pages to get through.