Five Ways to be a Better Reader

As professional communicators, we spend a lot of time on content development: from thinking about how best to tell a company’s story to making the finished product look good and every step in between. There is a plethora of resources available for consultation on how to be a better writer, but many overlook the most critical step: reading. A lot.

Reading stretches your vocabulary and engages the brain’s verbal capabilities. It also helps keep your grasp of grammar and syntax sharp and exposes you to different styles of writing. Perhaps most importantly for those of us in the public relations and marketing world, reading also helps us stay current with what’s going on in the media and our clients’ industries – a critical component of doing our jobs well. We must be familiar with the latest trends and the content of the news cycle to come up with relevant content ideas and thoughtful commentary.

Of course, nobody has all day to sit and read. Here are a few tips for making your reading time more productive and, I hope, more enjoyable as well:

1.       Mix up the material

When it comes to reading material, it can be easy to fall into a pattern of turning to the same sources: the daily newspaper that comes to your doorstep (or your smartphone); the veteran blogger that everyone in your industry follows and retweets; the feature stories published in national business magazines. To keep your perspective fresh, seek out relevant writers and publications outside of your old standbys. Twitter is a great place to find new voices and useful content, provided you follow users whose topics of interest overlap with your own.

2.       Save some for later

Reading online, it can be easy to “fall down the rabbit hole,” clicking on link after link until you realize you’ve just spent 45 minutes jumping between articles and blog posts and haven’t fully digested a single thing you’ve read. To curb the distraction impulse, I like to right-click an intriguing link and open it in a new window to come back to when I’ve finished the current piece. Alternatively, bookmarking resources and apps are another great way to flag content you want to come back to – I like Delicious.com and Evernote.

3.       Review and repeat

Re-reading can help to solidify your understanding of a piece of content. This is particularly useful when editing (your own work or somebody else’s): the first read-through is to get an overall feel for the story and pick out the main ideas. The second time around, pay attention to things like grammar and word choice and make note of areas for improvement.

4.       Share the highlights

Communications and marketing professionals tend to be well-acquainted with the world of social media, and many view sharing relevant content on channels like Twitter and LinkedIn as an important component of maintaining our personal brands. If you’re not already in the habit of disseminating interesting nuggets to your professional networks, consider this: on top of making you look smart and informed, it’s also a great reading comprehension exercise and creates a social media “breadcrumb trail” of useful information for your future reference.

5.       Unplug once in awhile

Thanks to desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, we live in a world where anyone who really wanted could probably swear off physically turning pages for good. That being said, reading the old-fashioned way still has its merits. A notification for a new text or Tweet will never pop up on the pages of a book and interrupt your train of thought. A hard copy of the New York Times won’t exhaust its battery life on your commute. Busy professional lives don’t offer us many opportunities to “unplug,” but it can be a refreshing way to recharge – and learn something in the process.

What are your own tried and true reading tips or habits?