Think about it for a moment? How many times has this happened to you in the past? You want to read and learn complex text. The amount of information it contains is overwhelming. You look at the book and experience an overwhelming sense of dread as your mind is flooded with questions. Where do I start? What am I supposed to learn? How can I learn this? Fortunately, there is a simple answer to all these questions. You can begin to relax as you learn the five things you should always learn to improve your reading comprehension, even while reading quickly.

There is an acronym that makes it easy to remember the five items you need to learn. The acronym is ABCOQ. The letter “A” stands for a summary of terms or words of the new vocabulary. “B” represents the biography or the names of the people described in your text. “C” is for chronologies, which is short for numbers, dates, and statistics. “O” represents creating an outline of all the headings found in your text, and looks for the four key points covered in each section. Finally, “Q” represents all the questions found in your book.

The next time you have complex text, you will want to learn the new vocabulary, names, numbers, key points, and questions. What else do you think you would need to learn to master any subject? In future articles, I’ll cover each of these five elements in more detail and describe how to learn them.