Answers to questions

Most often your eyes keep moving along the lines after your mind has drifted elsewhere. Short pauses help: after a paragraph or section, ask yourself a question about what you have read and answer it. If there is no answer, go back while there are only a few pages to reread.

Bold promises are best treated with caution. Skimming is fine for finding out what a text is about and whether you need it. But difficult material, such as a document, a textbook or a popular-science article, calls for slow reading and going back. Your pace grows by itself as your vocabulary and familiarity with texts expand.

If the unclear passage is crucial, reread it straight away. If it is secondary, mark it and carry on: the next paragraph often clarifies the previous one. At the end, go back to all your marks.

Reading aloud slows you down and stops you skipping words. It makes it easier to notice where a sentence is built in a complicated way and where the link between its parts gets lost. The technique is especially useful for documents and poetry.

Start with an explanatory dictionary of the modern language; every language has its own. For Russian, a classic choice is Ozhegov's dictionary, first published in 1949, while Dahl's dictionary, issued in 1863–1866, helps with old and folk words. Keep in mind that the language has changed since then.

Substitute each meaning for the word in your sentence and see which one produces a sensible phrase. The examples in the dictionary entry also help: compare them with your own context.

It is a set expression whose meaning does not add up from the meanings of its individual words. The Russian idiom "bit' baklushi", literally "to beat wooden blocks", means to idle about, and looking up each word separately will hardly help. Such expressions are found in dictionaries of idioms.

In a text corpus. For Russian, that is the Russian National Corpus, opened to users in 2004; other languages have corpora of their own. A corpus collects real texts, so you can see a word in dozens of different sentences. This helps you grasp shades of meaning that a dictionary describes only briefly.

Be wary if the phrase comes without any reference to a specific work, if its style does not match the language of the period, or if the same idea is attributed to different people. A genuine quotation can usually be found in a specific text, with a page or chapter number.

Start with the full text of the work named as the source and search within it. If no work is named, look for the phrase in digital libraries and text corpora. Versions on quotation websites do not count as an original source.

In conversation, yes, but in writing it is better to check the quotation against the source. Memory easily changes the word order, and sometimes the meaning of the phrase. If you cannot check it, honestly convey the idea in your own words without quotation marks.

A quotation reproduces the author's words exactly and is placed in quotation marks. A paraphrase conveys the idea in your own words and must not attribute to the author anything they did not say. In both cases it is worth stating where the material comes from.