Reading technical content is the part and parcel of an engineer’s life as a student or professional. They read a lot of technical content i.e. complicated principles and examples that come packed in the form of text books, product manuals, case studies, white papers, etc.
Reading good books can help an engineering student excel in academics whereas reading the technical content in a fast and efficient manner can make an engineer better professionally.
Reading technical books faster will help you process the information more quickly and understand it easily. So, let’s discuss how you can learn speed reading and read technical books faster and effectively.
Set aside time for reading
In today fast-moving life, people generally don’t have time to read books as they don’t consider reading books important. They read books only if there is nothing else to do or to pass the time while travelling or during vacations. One must change this attitude towards reading, and set aside some quality time for reading good books. In the case of technical books, keeping aside one hour is enough to read thirty pages of the book as technical books include technical terms, formula, theories, etc.
Read from back to front
To know about the important points of any particular chapter, one should forget the strategy of reading the chapter from front to back. Start from reading the questions given at the end of chapter, and then try to answer them. This will help you to determine your basic understanding of the topic, and then prepare your actual reading strategy.
Once you have gone through the questions, have a look at the summary of the chapter to get an idea about the general background about the ideas in the chapter. After that browse through the headings and sub-division of the chapter, and then go through the introduction of the chapter. By following this out-of-order book reading strategy, you would be connecting the ideas hidden in the particular chapter, and will help you in understanding the chapter in the first go itself.
Make notes while reading book
One should never have to read a chapter more than once, if the chapter has been read properly and notes of important things have been taken. It will take some time to get used to the habit of taking notes while reading but once you make note-making a habit, you will not regret it later. You will see the benefits of making notes while revising the chapter as you will save a lot of time in revising the entire syllabus. We hope these tips and techniques would be quite helpful to engineering students, who are targeting the GATE 2021 or ESE 2021 exams, as these tips would be very beneficial to them when they would be referring the best GATE books or ESE books during their preparation. By following these useful tips, they would be saving a lot of precious time that goes wasted in comprehending a particular topic or in revising the syllabus once the exams are approaching.
