If school or work requires a lot of reading, it’s hard to stay on track and focused. You should try different reading techniques to get the most out of what you have to consume. One such technique to try is the structure-proposition-evaluation (SPE) method, and it might work for you. It’s very critical and leaves you room to come to your own conclusions, making it great for work-related tasks or the study of philosophy or more theoretical subjects.

The structure-proposition evaluation technique has been around since 1940, when philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler included it in his How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education . According to Adler, it's up to you to figure out what the structure, author-made propositions, and your own evaluations are, but once you do, it will help you read more critically and get more out of what you're reading, especially if it's nonfiction.

There are three steps to using this method, and they correspond to the three words it is named after. Here is what you need to do:

Find the structure of the text. Pay attention to the table of contents, subheadings, chapter titles, tables, graphs, etc. Scan broadly to find out what it is all about and what you are likely to learn from it. The subheadings and titles tell you a lot about what you should get out of the text, so think about the structure in general, and even note the order in which information is presented to get a hint about what is fundamental and most important.