Welcome back. In this lecture, we're going to be talking about active reading. What are some of the things you can do to be an active reader? Well, one of the most important things you can do is limit your distractions. Put your cell phone away, sit in a quiet place by yourself so that no one will interrupt you. Try to read in the morning, a lot of people are more alert in the morning.

You may be one of the people that has tried to read at night before bed and every time that you start reading next thing you know, your eyes are shut and boom, your head is down and you're sleeping, right that happens to so many of us. Another important thing is good lighting. You want to make sure that you have adequate light to see so that your eyes aren't strained. Make sure that you're sitting in a comfortable chair. If you're slumped down on the sofa, you're probably going to be more likely to Get drowsy, like we said earlier, especially if you're reading in the evening. And another thing you can do to really help with being an active reader is to make sure that you have your book with you at all times.

Okay? So when you are leaving for work in the morning, go ahead and throw your book into your briefcase or backpack. If you're going to school, make sure that you have your E reader with you if you're using an E reader, because you never know when you're going to have a few extra minutes and you can just squeeze in reading all throughout your day and you'll get so many more pages read that way. Another important thing about active reading is visualization. You're when you're reading, you should be visualizing your story, like a movie in your head. I asked my students at school sometimes usually at the beginning of the year, raise your hand if you picture what you're reading in your head like a movie seeing the character And seeing the setting and all of that.

And you'd be surprised at how many students say that they don't actually picture and visualize the story in their mind. And that is such an important skill that you really need to learn as a good reader to be an active reader. So even if you end up imagining your neighbor as one of the characters or a movie actor or actress that you have seen, and when you're reading, it sounds sort of like them. And you've got one character is someone you know, from school or work. Another one is an actress or actor. And another one is your neighbor, it doesn't matter.

And maybe the setting is your own house or a house similar to yours, or your grandparents house. But you have to somehow find a way to visualize the story in your mind and it's really going to be easier for you to imagine the plot and stay with it and Kara care about the characters and what's happening throughout the story. So that's something we really want to try to do is, as you're beginning your story this week, you're going to really try to picture those characters and the setting in your mind, even if it's using neighbors and friends and co workers Just don't tell them and they'll never know. Another active reading strategy that has been known to work for a lot of people is to use what's called a pacer. It can be your finger along the lines of the book as you're reading from left to right, it could be just a small note card or your bookmark.

And if you're reading online, you could just scroll up so that the top line is at the top of your screen. But the advantage to using a pacer is if you do have problems with your eyes kind of getting tired, jumping around. Our eyes naturally have sokar odds which is little jumps that they make as we're reading and that's something that some speed reading teachers will tell you that you shouldn't, you should try to limit those. But you actually need those, you need to be able to jump back momentarily if your eyes need to because you're recognizing phonetic symbols as you're reading. And there's a lot of things out there with speed reading that. They're saying that really, honestly do not work.

And you can try them if you want to, and they'd be happy to take your money, but I'm just telling you right now that it is okay for your eyes to jump around a little bit. But if you'd like to use a pacer, some people find that it really does help them as far as their eyes being more relaxed and keeping themselves alert and moving down the page more quickly than they might have had they not used a pacer. So that's something that you can try just use your fingers or like I said, your bookmark and just guide it down the page, just a couple lines below where you're reading and keep yourself moving at a quick enough pace. So You are challenging yourself. And that might help you speed up your reading a little bit as we go through this course. Something else that I would like to address here is subvocalization.

And what that is, is, as you're reading, your mind is saying the words and you may be kind of hearing yourself reading aloud in your head. And most people speak between around 200 words a minute, and that's probably what if you speak that quickly, that's what you're reading. And it's normal for people to read between 203 hundred words a minute. Some people really want to speed that up, and that can be done. But ultimately, the comprehension does go down, it turns into skimming. And I know a lot of speed readers say they can read you know, hundreds of words per minute and that may be true, but ultimately, I'm just being honest, they are skimming and that has its place especially In nonfiction, and I'll be teaching another course on nonfiction coming up very soon.

But with reading fiction, you really do need to go ahead and let your your brain read at its own pace as quickly as you can, but you will be hearing a little bit of vocalization in your head. And it's not necessarily word for word. The more you get used to reading in, the faster you become at reading more skilled you become, the more vocabulary words you learn. And what happens with increasing your speed is the more you read, the more vocabulary words you recognize them and more quickly, and as you read more, it's just like any other sport or skill, it's like playing an instrument being on a athletic sport. The more you do it, the better you become at it. So what I'd like for you to do is set aside time every single day to Read them.

It's a scientific fact, the more you read, the better you will become at it, the quicker your you will read, the more you'll comprehend. And that's because you will be recognizing phonetic patterns more quickly. Because you're practicing and your eyes are getting trained, your brain is getting trained so that you don't have to say every single word in your head as you read, but you do know which ones sounds it's not so much words. It's more just phonetic sounds need to be processed through your brain. Your brain does that on its own. You don't need to consciously think about it.

But it's something that you will get quicker at as you read more and more. So just like anything else that you want to get good at, we've got to set aside time every day to read and we're going to be setting a goal. Next we're going to look at how many pages your book is and set a goal for how many pages you will read each day to finish your book for this course having deadlines in our lives is really important for us too. be successful. It's something that you can use to make sure that you accomplish something you're setting out to do. And in this course, we're setting out to read a novel or short story.

So I'd like for you to look over your story, figure out how many pages is this What's a realistic deadline, and set something up for a goal for yourself. There's a handout that comes with this lecture as a resource, and you can download it, and then write down your goal. And what I'd like for you to do is challenge yourself each week to get a little bit better. So let's say the first week you say I'm going to read 10 pages a day. Awesome. Read the 10 pages a day.

Then the next week, say I'm going to bump this up to 11 pages a day. And it won't necessarily take you very much longer because the more you read, as we said, the quicker you'll become at reading and the more skilled so second week, read 11 pages a day and 30 Read 12 and after about a month you'll have a complete novel read 300 and some pages. So, just take a few minutes and look at how many pages your story or novel go ahead and put what title, the title of your book and author and then how many pages you are going to read each day. I'd love to know what your goals are and encouraged you to achieve them. Good job choosing a book and setting goals for yourself. And I'll be looking forward to our next video where we're going to talk about conflict