You’re probably used to reading a lot onscreen—posting and responding to updates in your social networks, checking email, browsing the Web, and so on. Onscreen reading is often social and collaborative, allowing you to connect with other readers, discuss what you’ve read, and thus turn reading into writing.

In addition to changing reading from a solitary to a group activity, digital reading can be useful for finding information quickly. Research suggests that onscreen readers tend to take shortcuts, scanning and skimming and jumping from link to link. Because screen reading can help you find content that relates to what you’re looking for, it can be a powerful tool that you can use effectively in your college work.

Given these obvious advantages, you might think that readers would prefer to do most of their reading onscreen. But current research suggests that this is not yet the case. Students today tell researchers that they prefer to read print works when the reading needs to be absorbed and remembered. Like many students, you may find it easier to navigate and be in control of a print text—you know just where you are, how much you have read, and how much you have left to read; you can flip back and forth looking for something more easily than you can online. Reading on the Internet can often be distracting: with so much information on hand, it can be hard to concentrate on one text. Reading onscreen for long periods can also be tiring. Perhaps most importantly, psychologists find that students reading onscreen don’t do nearly as much “metacognitive learning”—that is, learning that reflects on what has been learned and makes connections among the things learned—as readers of print texts do. So it turns out that print still holds some major advantages for readers.

If you have a choice of media when you’re asked to read a text, then, consider whether reading onscreen or in print will work better for your purposes. And if you must read a complex text onscreen rather than in print, be aware that you may need to try harder than usual to focus. Get in the habit of working through the steps described in this chapter—previewing (7b), annotating (7c), summarizing (7d), and analyzing (7e and f)—to ensure that you are reflecting and making appropriate connections, whether you’re reading a printed page or a digital text.