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Tips for increasing reading comprehension in college students

So here you are fresh into college, and despite having read a few books in your life thus far, you suddenly find yourself faced with a mountain of knowledge bulging out of text and reference books that you need to read and digest in a pretty short space and time. I have to concede, it seems a pretty daunting task, and quite off-putting if you are not a regular reader or someone who has trained himself to speed-read.

It appears there are two issues here: the sheer volume of necessary reading that needs to be done, and the ability, not only to read it all, but also to comprehend and digest most of it meaningfully. Let us deal with each issue separately as, on the surface, they appear to contradict each other.
First, there is the problem of the amount of reading that is expected from college students. In many cases, this may well exceed anything that you have had to read so far: whereas before you may have read one or two fiction works to study, you pretty much would have worked your way through other text books at a pace determined by the curriculum demands and teacher lesson plans. Now, at college, where more emphasis is placed on individual self-study, you are going to find yourself having to read less for pleasure, and more for study-based comprehension.
There will be more reference books to read, and, unless you are already accustomed to reading such material regularly, you are going to find it a bit difficult to read and concentrate for long periods of time. Learning to speed read, then, is an option to help you cope. And this is where the apparent contradiction occurs: many people cannot comprehend how speed reading, which, by its very nature implies haste, can in any way improve comprehension, which, for some, refers to slow intense focus.
The truth of the matter is that those people who have trained themselves to speed read properly, have no difficulty absorbing what is read. The trick lies in training your eyes to focus on the key words in a sentence and to recognise the triggers and supports. What this means is, in a reasonably short sentence, not every word is necessary to convey the full sense of the sentence. Let us take this following sentence as an example:
Did you know that Walt Disney was afraid of mice?
The art of finding keywords is a simple one to practice. If you were writing the above sentence down as notes, not every word is needed for you to remember the main ideas. So what you are

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