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Reading for Content Guide
Normally, when reading a text, people use a strategy that I call "reading for content".
The goal of this strategy is to get the main idea of the text as quickly as possible and with as little effort as possible.
To accomplish this goal, your brain will try to read as few words as possible and spend only a fraction of a second on each word.
Here are some characteristics of "reading for content":
Not seeing "grammar words" like a, the, in, of, through, that. The eye only stops at content words (main nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs).
Not seeing word forms: Was it look or looked? Has looked or had looked?
Not noticing the exact spelling. It is well known that the brain recognizes whole words - it does not analyze them letter by letter. Native speakers see the word piece all the time, but many of them still misspell it as peice, because the two spellings have similar shapes.
Ignoring difficult words that are not essential to understanding the meaning (here: primeval, constrictor). Who has the time to use a dictionary?
Pause and think
Here's the process that the "pause and think" method recommends for dealing with sentences in texts:
Stop at interesting (not obvious) things: a new word, how a word was used, a grammatical structure, a preposition, an article, a conjunction, the order of words, etc. For example, spend a while to think about the fact that the sentence contains the preposition at, and not on. Perhaps the sentence uses the present perfect tense where you would have expected the past simple. Perhaps the word order is different than in your first language.
If the sentence contains a useful phrase, ask yourself: Could you produce a similar phrase yourself? Would you use the right tenses, articles and prepositions? Would you use the right word order? If you're not sure, practice saying a similar phrase aloud or in your mind. The idea is to move the phrase to your "active vocabulary".
If necessary, or if you feel like it, use your dictionary to find definitions of words in the sentence and get more example sentences. This will help enrich your "feel" of the word.
If you use SuperMemo, consider adding the phrase to your collection (e.g. as a sentence item) to make sure it will stay in your memory. Of course, only useful phrases should be added.