Imagine that you’re walking down the street looking for a particular building. You’re not sure of the address, but you have a general description of the place: a building that covers an entire block, with a rooftop garden, located next to a church with four thin spires around a central clock tower. You’re peering up at every building as you go by, slowing down to see if you can tell whether there’s a garden on this one, or if that one stretches the length of the block, or if the church on the next corner has a clock tower or not. Your walking pace will be slow as you try to locate the exact place you need.

Now imagine that you’re in a helicopter looking down on the same part of the city. The block-wide buildings are easy to spot, and one that has a rooftop garden will be immediately obvious due to its color. Checking the number of spires on the church next door is a matter of seconds. You’ve found the building you need in a fraction of the time it took you from the ground.

In the same way, a slow reading speed and the wrong reading strategies will decrease your chances that you’ll find the information you need quickly or be able to remember it afterwards. When you read slowly, you’re taking in concepts and words too slowly to develop an overall idea of the general theme of the text. Your brain gets stuck processing the smaller bits of information, and loses the capacity to take in the whole picture.

A good way to help your brain develop this overall picture is to get a bird’s-eye view of the material you’re going to read and by using any highlights, summaries, and study tools already provided as part of the text. First, prepare your mind to read. Why are you reading this? What do you need to get from the text? What questions do you want to have answered? What key information do you need to find or verify?

Next, go through the chapter headings and summaries, make a note of the graphics and tables, and use the appendix and glossary to target answers and to make sure you know the terms and concepts that are going to be used. Just by going through this material alone, you might find your answers, but if not, you’ll be prepared to read efficiently, because you’ll have an overview of what the text will be explaining and the order of the information presented. In addition, you’ll have a better idea of where you’ll be most likely to find the answers you need.