As a student you’ll definitely have a lot of reading to do no matter what classes you take, and if you wait too long to get started it will pile up very quickly. But there are ways to make reading faster and easier.

It’s a bad idea to just dive into a textbook from page one without previewing the book first. If you’re not sure what the chapter is about and where it’s going, you can get lost and lose focus easily. Most books are usually divided up into chapters and placed in a certain order, so if you first take a look at how the book is put together, it might help you understand it better and read it faster.

Try to preview the book first by reading the chapter titles in the table of contents, and then looking over the subtitles and the first sentence of each paragraph in a certain chapter. Doing this for a few minutes will help you understand the book’s structure and main points so that you’ll know where the information is going while you read. Also, if you come up with any questions about the material, keep them in mind so that you’ll have something specific to look for when you start reading. For example, if you're reading a chapter from a biology textbook about muscles, you might wonder what they are made of or how many types of muscles you have in your body. These are things you can look for while you read, and it can help you stay more active and focused.

Another thing that helps is to break a chapter up and read a few sections at a time. Reading everything at once can be overwhelming, and might be too much to remember. So try reading a few pages and taking short notes in the margins of the page to help you remember what you read.