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How to Read a Big Fat Chapter:
I know it can seem overwhelming when you are given a whole chapter of atextbook to read. It’s a skill to be able to not only read the information, butunderstand it and be able to remember it as well. It’s a skill you will need inyour further studies. Hopefully this guide will give you some pointers on howto ‘attack’ a big fat chapter…
1. Read the last bit first.
 Yes, it may seem like a strange place to begin, but try starting with theconclusion of the chapter. The conclusion usually summarises the wholechapter, telling you briefly what has just been written about. Read theconclusion and make write some questions from it. You can then use thesequestions to guide your reading of the rest of the chapter.Another similar way of starting the chapter, is to read the introduction THENthe conclusion so you are effectively getting two brief summaries of thechapter, which will give you a good idea of what you are going to read aboutbefore you have even started digging through the heavy stuff. The questions you should have written based on these two sections of thechapter could be things like
Why did X happen?
What caused X to happen?
Who was X?
Why was he or she so important?
When did X happen?
How does X link to X?Make sure you do write a few ‘deeper’ questions that ask about the
causes
of things and how they affect each other, not just ‘who is…’ and ‘what is…’questions.
2. Scan the chapter
Even though you have now read the start and end of the chapter, you arestill not quite ready to dive into the guts of it just yet.Next thing to do is scan through the pages focusing on the subheadings of all the different sections. Write one or two questions per subheading. Thenread the first one or two lines of that section. This enables you to createimmediate links to the information you have just learned from reading theintroduction and the conclusion.
 
Creating those links as quickly as possible helps to really set that knowledgein your mind, hopefully avoiding those moments when you catch yourself reading the same paragraph 4 times and still having no idea what it wasabout! By reading the first couple of lines of each chapter you may even beable to answer some of the questions you have noted down.
3. Looking at and organising your questions
By now you have a decent list of questions about the contents of thechapter. It is important that these are written somewhere in an organizedway (not just in the margins of the chapter!) so they can be used to guideyour reading of the chapter and also so that you can really focus yourattention to making sure you get the answers! Try typing them up into a list, or into a mind map, or grid or whatever styleyou like. Have them printed off or have your computer next to you when youstart to read the chapter so you can add in the answers straight away. Thesequestions and their answers will be your notes for the chapter.
4. Divide the page
Right, now you are almost ready to jump right in to the middle of all the newlearning you’re about to do!Look at the page in front of you and see if you can break it up in to decentsized ‘chunks.’ This will help you to make the page more manageable. Usehighlighters or textas or pens to actually make marks on the page so youcan see what the sections are. Gone are the times when you look at a pageand think ‘My God, there is no way I can get through that.’ Your highlightersare just about to show you that is not true! Of course you can, just not all inone ‘chunk.’
5. Only now are you ready to dive right in
Ok, so by now you should have:
•
read the introduction and conclusion and written questions based onthese
•
scanned the chapter and written questions based on the subheadings
•
read the first 1-2 lines of each of the sections of the chapter
•
have an organized list of questions ready for you to refer to and takenotes on
•
divided up the first page into chunks
of 00

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