Using Pre-Reading Strategies
Academic reading is not like reading a novel. You aren’t starting at the beginning and looking forward to being surprised and delighted as you turn the page. And you certainly aren’t going to wait until the last chapter to know how it ends, like you would with a mystery. You want to understand as much as you can about the reading right from the beginning so that you can read efficiently.
This is called “pre-reading” or sometimes “previewing.” When you pre-read a text, you’ll turn into a temporary sleuth, examining the text for clues as to its meaning.
Start with the Title
A good title will inform you about the text’s content. Titles can also be interesting, catchy, or clever, but the most important job of a title is to let the reader know what the text will be about.
For instance, imagine you’re reading a magazine article entitled “Three Hundred Sixty-five Properly Poofy Days.” Reading that title, do you have any idea what this article is going to be about?
- It could be written by a meteorologist, reporting on a year of observing cloud formations.
- It might be a biopic (a biographical story) about an eccentric salon that specializes in “big hair” dos.
- Or it could be a story about a dog groomer who grooms poodles, the poofiest of dogs.
This title doesn’t give enough information about the content of the text. Keep this in mind when you are writing your own titles!
Take a look at the important words in the title, usually the nouns. Those words should tell you about the content of the article. If you aren’t familiar with a word in the title, this is a good time to look it up (and make a note of the definition). That word will almost certainly be important in your understanding of the reading.
Sometimes, you will see titles with two parts. In books and magazine articles, a second title often appears in smaller and sometimes different font under the main title. The second title is called a “subtitle,” and it’s usually more informative than the main title. In academic research articles, also known as scholarly articles, these titles usually follow the main title after a colon.
Let’s look at a couple of two-part titles.
In the case of the image on the right, the main title, To Be an American, could mean quite a few different things, but the phrases “cultural pluralism” and “rhetoric of assimilation” give us a hint that the book will be about how and whether minority communities maintain their own cultures or assimilate. If you read the description of the book, you’ll see that this one focuses specifically on immigrants, a point which isn’t clear from the title, though it is implied a bit in the idea of the main title about being American. This is an example of a title that could be a bit clearer to help readers understand the focus of the book.
Article titles also use subtitles, though this is much more common in scholarly articles than in popular articles. The first part of the title “Mobile Phone Use While Driving” (be