Feedback Focus

Personally, I find that reading out loud and writing my comments as I go is the easiest and most effective way for me to focus on a story. When reading out loud I generally grab my dog and read to her. She's not very attentive but it feels more productive and less silly than reading out loud by myself in my room. I actually already use the reading out loud technique when reading really complicated articles  for other classes like my social theory class. Sometimes it's very easy to miss a sentence, to lose focus and daydream, or just not understand a jumble of word salad if you only try parsing it out in your head. Reading out loud keeps me focused and critical.

I generally use a slightly different form of the copy-paste and delete technique. I generally follow the copy-paste, but I don't delete every paragraph once I'm done, I just add my notes in the middle. This is pretty helpful especially on a second reading because it's really easy for me to forget what I just read and have to read it over. If I already have short notes for it, I can remember much more easily.

The timer technique really seemed more bothersome than helpful. I always find myself with a couple minutes leftover after I'm done reading. Furthermore I also find it hard to concentrate on something for a full ten minutes. My mind constantly wanders any time I'm doing anything and I think setting a timer for myself makes me concentrate more on the timer and in some weird way I focus too much on focusing to actually read well. The other two techniques work much better.

(focusing is hard, wikipedia)