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Improve your comprehension
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Improve your comprehension
Comprehension is usually the ultimate goal of reading. You want to understand and learn what the author is communicating. More than previous parts though, how well you comprehend material depends on many varied factors. If you want to learn and remember the material, you also have more work to do to retain it for the long term. This last main module provides you with tools and techniques to help you start on that path.
The previous sections of this course have focused on improving your reading speed. In this section, we take a closer look at the last part to effective reading – comprehension.
How well you comprehend a book depends on many factors. Some of those include:
- Your reading level and vocabulary.
- Your previous understanding of the topic.
- How long it takes you to read the material.
- Your concentration levels.
- Your "world knowledge."
- Your learning and memory skills.
- Your motivation.
- ... and more.
Unfortunately, no one simple technique will help you improve your comprehension of a book. You may remember in the introduction I mentioned that you should treat reading a book as a content collection exercise. If you are reading a book to learn a new topic well, you need to take several more steps. The Memletic Process, described in the Memletics Accelerated Learning Manual, consists of five main steps:
Unfortunately, no one simple technique will help you improve your comprehension of a book. You may remember in the introduction I mentioned that you should treat reading a book as a content collection exercise. If you are reading a book to learn a new topic well, you need to take several more steps. The Memletic Process, described in the Memletics Accelerated Learning Manual, consists of five main steps:
Reading a book mainly falls in the Locate step of this process. Some well-written books will also help you Explore the content, so you can improve your understanding. Once you have this understanding though, it won't last. That's why you need to Arrange the material for memorization, Reinforce it using memory techniques, and then review your progress using the eNquire step.
The Memletics Accelerated Learning Manual provides details on all these steps and more. I've included a summary of the entire manual in the next chapter.
In this section, I've provided three complete extracts from the manual related to comprehension. These are on Attention and Concentration from the State chapter, and the Locate and Explore steps from the Memletic Process chapter.
As you can see, learning to read effectively is just one part of effective learning. I couldn't hope to cover all the ways to improve comprehension through better learning skills in this chapter. The Memletics Manual is 220 pages of material devoted to just that. The following material is the most relevant from that book. If your goal is to improve your overall learning performance, I strongly suggest you read the Memletics Manual with this course.
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