When I am reading for a class or for fun, I always have some sort of dialogue in my head. In order to make the story interesting I imagine what is happening in my mind while I read. Because of this I usually have to go back and re-read the pages a couple times to get a real idea of what is happening on the page. First, for things I have to read for class, there are usually guiding questions the teacher will ask to get your mind going. For me this helps because then I look for important information that the teacher has asked us to look for. Some times when there are not guiding questions, I get to the end and wonder, “What was the point of this article?” When the teacher does not provide directive questions, the first and summary paragraphs are very important. In the first paragraph, it usually talks about the important subjects or the main ideas of the text. In the summary paragraph, it reinforces the main points of what you have just read. This can be helpful or it can make you more confused because the summary paragraph emphasizes different points in the reading than you thought were important.
The other direction I look for in reading text is how it is broken into sections. This is always good because the different sections show the main ideas and then it is now up to you to understand what the author is trying to say. Again it can be difficult to do this because the writing style of the writer may be hard to understand. Using these study traits I mentioned help create the dialogue in my head and help me understand what I have read. As I read I can ask myself in my mind, “what is the point he is trying to make here?” Sometimes talking through it in your mind can help you figure out what the writer was really saying. Yes it may seem weird but it has helped me out before. These are some of the ways I think of text when I read. I develop a dialogue in my head and identify the important information.