Improve your Reading Skills – Bad Reading Habits you Should Avoid!
Note for the readers: The bad reading habits to avoid can be helpful for students who are intending to take any English Language Proficiency Tests!
Reading is an essential skill that develops over a period of time and cannot be developed overnight. It is suggested that students set aside time to read each day, at least 20 minutes to build your skills. You can read newspaper articles, magazines, books or any other kind of texts as long as you are reading each day for 20 minutes. There are various good habits and bad habits associated with your reading habit and here are a few bad reading habits that you should eliminate immediately if you have any!
1. Poor Fluency
Poor fluency is associated with machine-gun reading. What is a machine- gun reading though? It is a reading habit where you read rushing past commas and other important punctuation signs instead of pausing. If you are in this habit, you should immediately eliminate this as it will directly hamper the understanding of your text.
Instead, you should stop at commas, colons, semi colons and try to understand what each punctuation mark are used for. Try this next time you read any text!
2. Not identifying functions of keys words used
A lot of times students rush through the texts and often are not able to identify the function of various key words used in the text. Key words link ideas in a text and if you do not understand the connection between ideas, you will definitely not understand your text. Be aware of key words that link opposite ideas, words that connect parallel ideas and words that connect a cause and an effect.
3. Not paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is definitely an essential skill in writing however; you must be wondering why you would require this skill in your reading. Paraphrasing while reading will help you in two different ways: you will understand the text better and you commit what you have read to a long term memory. You should take notes while you are reading, paraphrase texts to have a better understanding of the text.
Besides, the questions in the reading sections of most of the tests will use a paraphrase rather than the original text.
4. Not understanding the organization
Most of the skilled readers can easily understand the gist of the text by reading the introduction and conclusion. They read the body paragraphs after reading the introduction and, conclusion to have a better understanding of the text. Most of the academic texts have a thesis statement in the introduction that gives any reader an idea about what will be in the text. Body paragraphs also have a particular topic they focus on and if you work on understanding how the text is organized, you will see that it will help you in the understanding of the text.
Of course there can be many other bad reading habits one can have. We have listed the four major bad habits that are common with many of our students and if you have got any of these, you know it is time you get rid of it as soon as you can!
