MORE STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING YOUR READING
Make a conscious effort to understand what you’re doing as you read. As soon as your mind starts
wandering, toss out a mental lasso and pull yourself back. Work on keeping your focus.
If you start to get tired, drink water, not energy drinks, and remember to breathe. Do some neck
exercises to get your blood circulating to your brain. You won’t be allowed to get up and walk
around during the exam, so try to get used to reading, concentrating, and thinking for periods of an
hour or more at a time.
Let your body help you read. Your text should be in line with your sight. Your visual path can’t bend.
Prop up your book—don’t lay it flat on a desk or table. And your arms will get tired if you try to
hold a book up while lying flat on the floor or in bed. Practice your reading while sitting at a desk or
a table, as this is the most likely position you’ll be in while taking the AP exam.
Minimize distractions. Do NOT read while listening to music on your mp3 player! You may think
you are concentrating, but, in reality, you are forcing your brain to think of two things at once, a
practice that is stressful and counter-productive for exam prep. You will not be allowed to have any
electronic devices with you for the exam, so get used to reading in relative silence.
Practice controlling your emotions by choosing some tough texts to read. Read them, annotate them,
and feel good about your progress. Read Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Voltaire, or Dostoevsky, to start.
A lot of older texts are online. You can download them to an e-reader, or read them online. If you
really want to practice annotating the text, it is best to have hard copies of the texts. You can search
Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), for example, to find many of the authors listed in
Chapters 3 and 4.
Give yourself permission to skip words. You don’t have to read every single word to know what’s
going on. This is not to say that you should skim—not at all, but if you think you have to look up
every word, you will miss the “big picture.” This is especially true of novels, plays, or longer
works. In short poems, each word is going to more important just because there are so few of them to
begin with.
Learn how annotate texts and practice this skill before the exam. This may be the most important
thing you can do to improve your reading skills for the AP Lit exam. There is more on this later in
this chapter.
When you take your AP Lit exam, plan to quickly skim the multiple-choice questions that relate to a
text. You won’t have time to read all of the questions first, but if you know there is a question on
mood and another on irony, you can look for those aspects in the text and mark them as you read.
Be a reading Ninja! Think of each text on the exam as a noble, worthy opponent, but
one that will not defeat you. Respect these literary opponents, recognize their
strengths and special elements, but feel confident that you can read, understand, and
respond to them. Never think you are too weak for any reading challenge!
