Comparison & Contrast Essay help needed

Active Reading vs. Passive Reading

Couch Potato is a phrase that describes a person who always sits on the couch watching television and does not have an active life. In my opinion, this phrase can also describe the people who just receive knowledge passively without really think about it. This kind of passive learning often happens in college classes. Students usually have lots of readings to do. Therefore, some of them may sacrifice quality for quantity. In other words, some of them choose to read passively or mechanically instead of read actively. However, this is not an effective way to learn. For truly understanding the materials, students must actively participate in the learning process. Therefore, active reading is indispensable.

Before learning the correct reading method, we need to understand why passive reading is not really useful. As a widely used reading method, passive reading acts an important role in many students’ lives. Passive reading does not require many skills to perform. Students just need to finish the reading and memorize whatever their instructors tell them to memorize. Surly, this way can let students pass some easy tests or completes some simple assignments. But it will not benefit students in long term. Mechanically memorizing books is like gobbling food without taste it. It can save a person from starving, but it can’t give the person many nutritions.

Therefore, active reading is needed to improve students’ understanding of readings to a higher level. Active reading, also known as critical reading. The greatest difference between it and passive reading is that active reading requires students to interact with writers. Students should not see writers’ every word as divine physics theory. Students have the right and need to question, doubt or argue the writer’s ideas whenever they have different ideas than the writer. Doing so can benefit students’ both reading and writing skills.

First, by reading actively, students need to analyze the writer’s all words carefully. This will absolutely give students a better view of the reading than just searching for what will be on the test. Students need to find out that what is the writer’s main point and any other supporting ideas and repeatedly ask themselves whether they agree with the author. If not, what do they think it should be. In this process, students can gain many experiences on extracting key points from readings. And it will also practice students’ critical thinking ability. Students will have more chances to think independently and build their own wonderful ideas.

Active reading does not only benefit students’ reading skills, but also their writing skills. Reading actively can help students to be good readers. And being good readers can help students to be good writers. When critical others’ writings, students also see how others express their ideas. By seeing and analyzing how other outstanding writers weave words into sentences and weave sentences into beautiful essays, students will learn the correct procedure of writing a powerful essay. Although it might be hard to improve students’ writing skills quickly at the beginning, it will get more and more better as students read more and more good essays. Just like Samuel Cohen says in his book “50 Essays”, the more people read, the better people write.

As a college student, I feel the same way as well. When I first entered college two years ago, I knew nothing about how to write a powerful essay. My essays were frequently off topic, too short or lack of persuasion. But as time passed, I read many well-developed essays in textbooks and my instructions’ recommendations. I learned what a good essay should look like. Know who are the audiences and choose a useful topic. Build a powerful thesis and find evidences to support it. Add cohesion to the writing to make it a smooth story. I learned not only what other writers’ stories about, but also how they tell stories in an effective way. My essay writing skill got significant improvement.

Active reading has so many benefits to students. However, doing active learning does not equal to completely abandoning passive reading. As I said earlier, active reading takes much more time than passive reading does. So passive reading is still an effective way to gather information quickly when students have too much work to do. But students should remember that they should always come back for those writings they are interested in when they have time. Taste the deep meaning in it and learn how the writer expresses his or her ideas.

In conclusion, active reading and passive reading both have their merits. But for the benefit of long term, active reading is a better way to learn. Students should always try to understand materials with active reading method in order to improve both their reading skills and writing skills.