Where, When, and How to Read: Setting Yourself Up for Reading Success
Chances are, if you’ve landed on this page, something isn’t going well with your reading. We don’t tend to think Hmm. Things are going really well. I should go find a resource with tips about how to do this thing I’m already doing with no trouble!
No. You’re probably here because something about the reading process is frustrating you.
Maybe you’ve found yourself reading the same page over and over again, giving hours of your life over to Nathaniel Hawthorne or whoever wrote your physics textbook with nothing to show for it.
Maybe you thought you were reading just fine, but then you had to take a quiz or write a paper, and you found out that you couldn’t actually remember much.
Maybe you just can’t keep your mind on the text and find yourself thinking about what to make for dinner, your favorite YouTuber’s latest release, or the lyrics to a song you hate — you know, anything except the actual words on the page.
If that’s where you are right now, don’t worry. We’ve all been there. Reading can be an amazing way to access information and explore new worlds, but it can also be frustrating, boring, difficult, or annoying.
Let’s dig in to what we can do to get things working more smoothly when it comes to reading.
What Can You Control?
As a reader, there are parts of the process that are outside of your control. You can’t control what vocabulary words the author chose or how long and incomprehensible they made their sentences. Some books are just hard to read, and they’re going to be a challenge no matter what we do.
However, there are still plenty of things within our control that impact reading.
Environmental factors like the location we’re in while reading, the comfort level of the position we’re sitting in, and the lighting can all make it more or less challenging.
Meanwhile, personal factors like whether we’re hot or cold, hungry, tired, thirsty, antsy, or unfocused can definitely impact how well we understand what we’re reading.
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Successful Reading Requires Honesty
The bottom line is that no one else can tell you what’s going on in your own mind. The only person who can ultimately say whether your reading is successful or not is you.
But that requires honesty with yourself.
Check in as you are reading and ask yourself some important questions:
- Am I as focused as I’d like to be right now?
- Are there distractions I can eliminate?
- Have I taken care of my basic needs to make my reading more successful?
- The last time I read in this location, did it work out well?
- The last time I read at this time of day, did it work out well?
- What’s one change I can make to my environment right now that will make reading more successful?