Study Tips Series: Reading For A Purpose

Hey Everyone and welcome to my new blog series. This series will focus on studying and offer some tips and tricks for those undergoing educational courses at any level. This series will cover things such as reading tips, note-making, source checking, referencing and everything inbetween.

To start with the first post will be tips on How To Read For A Purpose.

Reading for a purpose is an entirely different thing to reading for leisure. The information you need to absorb isn’t part of telling a story and quite often you will need to make notes and disengage from your reading as you write.

When reading for a purpose it is an important factor to write down exactly what it is you are wanting to know, the aim and purpose of the reading.

After that it is best to look into which sources you will want to use and to check all the relevant information is up to date.

When looking at these sources do not forget to check who wrote them and to ensure the source is credible , sources such as wikipedia are often frowned upon as the information can be changed and altered by anyone.

Make a note of any relevant chapters, sections or page numbers which are specific to your needs. Don’t forget to check the index or keywords sections.

Scan or skim read the sections which you have note and highlight any relevant information that may be of importance, also note the page number and book details for your bibliography.

Once this is done you can now assess the selected information.

Firstly check whether it answers your questions and helps to prepare your document.

Secondly photocopy and relevant sections and highlight the neccessary parts.

Every so often so and go through and review what you have got. Reviewing will help you maintain focus and direction and then you can disguard anything that you have noted off track or irrelevant to your purpose.

Doing the basic things that are listed above will help to set the foundations for your projects and essays and make going forward with them much smoother.

Next week we will take a look at Identifying and Extracting information when doing your research.

If there is anything you would like to ask or see discussed in a future post please don’t hesitate to drop a comment below or contact me via email at thestationerygeekett@yahoo.com or alternatively message me via my Facebook page.

Thanks for reading.

The Stationery Geekette x