When the society column mentions that a prominent local family will be going abroad for the summer, that information is read very differently by their friends, by the owner of a lawn maintenance company, and by a burglar. Readers are said to use two levels of strategies. Cognitive strategies enable the reader to understand written text. In practice, the two levels of strategy work together. Studies have demonstrated that better readers and learners go about the task more strategically than others do, which means they have greater conscious control over what and how they read.
Readers engage nearly every kind of thought process during reading.
The strategic activities of readers are not only highly active and interpretive, they are recursive and non-linear . Readers make ready use of nonverbal cues with they read. And because every reader translates the written message into such a world, we can never know information as information alone, but only as as it is reflected in a particular, lived system of meaning. In cognitive theory, then, readers are selective, active, and strategic. Readers activate strategies for managing their approach to a text, along with schemas for interpreting it.