Tips For Reviewing

Take a minute to think about what you do when you read.

• What techniques do you find most useful during reading?
• What are the most common problems you have with reading for academic assignments?
• How can you improve your skills while reading as an active reader?

Reviewing will refine your mental organization and begin building memory. Here are some tips for reviewing, the fifth step in active reading:

• Once you have completed the whole chapter:
  • Reread your outline, look away, and recite the outline from memory.
  • Look back over all of your questions.
  • Continue this process until you feel that you understand and know the material.
• Take a short break and reward your success.
• Decide when you are ready to work again, center your thoughts, take a few minutes to review the information you just learned, and go on to the next chapter or another subject
• Review areas that challenged your attitudes, beliefs, or responses to current issues. Look for patterns.
• Outline themes and summarize sections.
  • Outlining distinguishes between main ideas, supporting ideas, and examples.
  • Summarizing begins with an outline, but ends by putting all the ideas together in your own words in condensed form.
  • Test the credibility, logic, and emotional impact of what you have read. Do not just accept everything as truth. The author will make an argument for an idea, opinion, and belief, but the author's conclusions do not necessarily have to be the same as yours, and vice versa. As you read, you can have a "conversation" with the author, as well as having a continuous interview with yourself.