COMM 207: The 'Six Reading Myths' I mentioned in class (won't hurt other COMM students to know it too)

This is worth the price of this semester's tuition --

It's a handout from the Academic Skills Center at Dartmouth College titled "Six Reading Myths." It makes the point that we read most effectively if we take it in two stages:

• Skim once as rapidly as possible to determine the main idea and to identify those parts that need careful reading.
  
• Reread more carefully to plug the gaps in your knowledge.

If I had to boil it down to one word, that one word would be: "Skim!" You're playing a sucker's game if you read every word. Here, in MYTH 5: IF I SKIM OR READ TOO RAPIDLY MY COMPREHENSION WILL DROP, is the money graf:

Many people refuse to push themselves faster in reading for fear that they will lose comprehension. However, research shows that there is little relationship between rate and comprehension. Some students read rapidly and comprehend well, others read slowly and comprehend poorly. Whether you have good comprehension depends on whether you can extract and retain the important ideas from your reading, not on how fast you read. If you can do this, you can also increase your speed. If you "clutch up" when trying to read fast or skim and worry about your comprehension, it will drop because your mind is occupied with your fears and you are not paying attention to the ideas that you are reading.

If you concentrate on your purpose for reading -- e.g. locating main ideas and details, and forcing yourself to stick to the task of finding them quickly -- both your speed and comprehension could increase. Your concern should be not with how fast you can get through a chapter, but with how quickly you can locate the facts and ideas that you need.

Well, OK, two grafs. Calling something a "money graf," by the way, is another way of saying it's the key paragraph, the point that sums up all the rest of it.

A note for COMM 207 students (and a refresher for everybody else): Follow the link above and go back to the Dartmouth College handout. You'll note that they typed in two spaces after each period. Just like Miss Thistlebottom told you in high school English class, right? Well, I don't want you to ever do that! In an age of computerized typesetting, obeying Miss Thistlebottom's rule will only mess up the justification. It took me a couple of years before I trained my thumb to not hit the space bar, but you'll have to do it sooner or later if you're going to be a professional writer. Might as well start now!