English 91 Departmental Reading Exam

For your departmental exam (timed exam) this week, I think most of you can pass IF you remember to annotate the reading when you read such as by summing up each paragraph in a phrase. However, you should not be spending a lot of time annotating since the test is timed. It should take only a few seconds to write a phrase or a sentence on the margin for each paragraph.

Quickly review my example of annotating and turning the annotations into a summary at: http://cuny.SpirFit.com/2011/10/improve-reading-by-annotating-smart.html

Again, if you want to do well, you should at least remember (if you remember nothing else) to:
1. Annotate while you read.
2. Simply turn your annotations into a summary (for the question asking you to summarize).
3. Make sure the first sentence of the summary has MAT (main idea, author, and title)
4. If you have time left at the end, re-read the passage several times and check your answers to the questions. Also, check or edit your summary.

If you remember to do all these, you will be fine.