Active Reading

Read with a pencil in hand - mark, question, and extract before highlights die in the book.

Key Concept

• Passive reading forgets by Friday - active reading leaves something you can cite next month.
• Level 1: Mark what matters while you read - like underlining the one recipe you will cook again, not every line on the page.
• Level 2: Active reading means highlights with a next step - margin notes that become sentences in your own words.
• Level 3: One pass cannot hold structure and your take - active reading keeps marks from dying where nobody revisits them.
• Level 4: Skim first, mark second, extract third - same source, increasing depth, one sitting at a time.
• Level 5: Layered Reading names the passes; The Feynman Technique is the teach-it-back layer that proves you understood the marks.
• Yellow highlights without extraction are bookmarks, not learning - move marks into notes before the spine closes.
• Active reading feeds Literature Notes - your words, not the author's sentences copied twice.

Examples

• First pass on the coaching manual marked three sections; second pass only those got sentences in my own words.
• My kid underlined one confusing paragraph and explained it back to me - the mark survived because she had to say it out loud.

Note Relationships