Improving Reading Comprehension for Effective Essay Writing
No form of writing, personal, academic or official can be complete without referring to external sources of information. Reading and comprehension is the primary source of obtaining information, which is later processed into various forms of writing exercises. Essay writing requires the writer to read and absorb information that is scattered all over the information resource and use it as a meaningful whole.
In this context efficient reading and comprehension becomes a key skill in dissertation or essay writing. If a student can read within the context of the given word, semantically and metaphorically understanding the hidden meaning in a given frame of time, he/she can write essays with much ease.
This article brings to light the ways of processing information which in turn helps a student in absorbing information for better understanding, comprehension and writing.
The aim of a good reading exercise is to effectively comprehend the author’s message within its context, simultaneously forming an unbiased opinion of it. According to psychologists, there are two ways of processing meaning from a written material. One is Bottom p approach and the other is called Top down or result based approach.
The bottom up approach is the one where the reader moves from particular to general by decoding the words and their meaning. It takes into account the units of language like parts of speech, intonation, modulation and their impact on the message. Since it makes little use of the reader’s prior knowledge or understanding of the topic, the reader has to solely rely on the juxtaposition of words and the meaning that come from it. These units come together to make a comprehensive meaning of the text. However this approach does not help in interpreting the message completely.
The other approach, called the top down or the result based approach, works on a wider level. It takes into account the external information to be able to understand the text. The meaning generated from this form of reading is mainly result oriented as the reader uses his/her knowledge in interpreting the written word.
Neither of the two approaches, used individually is sufficient to process information.An effective reading exercise makes use of both the reading strategies to deduce meaning form the text. This combination of reading helps essay writer absorb information in a new perspective and generate ideas for essay writing.
