To cope with the large quantity of reading at tertiary level there are a number of options open to you.

• Firstly, you can speed up your reading, and that doesn't mean just increasing the number of words you can read in a minute. What you need to do is increase the speed that you process the information that you read.

• The second way to make your reading easier is to learn strategies which will improve your ability to organise the material that you read, so that you can get it into a form which is easy to work from when studying, and simplify writing essays or reports based on what you've read.

• Another strategy which can save you a lot of time at university is to prepare for lectures before you attend them. Such a pro-active approach can save you many hours of study in the longer term. It stands to reason that if you have general understanding of a topic before you attend a lecture, then you will learn far more. You will also be able to ask specific questions about any areas of concern while you are in the lecture, so you can clear up any confusions quickly. It's much harder to do this if you wait for 2 months until just before your exams.

• The final skill is one that many teachers forget to mention, yet it is probably the most important- that is the ability to read poorly written material. You see, just because someone is an expert in a particular field that is no guarantee that he/she is an expert writer. Many textbooks, reference books and journal articles are not very well written, so it can very difficult to get coherent information out of them unless you have the specialised reading skills necessary for reading poorly written material. Once you learn how to recognise poor writing, and have the skills to deal with it, you will realise that you are a much better reader than you thought you were!