How to read a three card spread
Three cards is the spread most people learn first and the one most readers keep using. Here is how to get something useful out of it rather than three disconnected fortune cookies.
The positions do most of the work
A card means something different depending on where it lands. The Three of Swords in "what is behind you" is a hurt you have already had; in "where it is heading" it is one you have not. Same card, opposite readings, and the difference is entirely the position. If you take one idea from this piece, take that one.
Read them together before you read them apart
Look at all three before you look up any of them. How many are major arcana? What suit dominates? How many are reversed? That shape tells you what register the whole situation is in, and it is the part a dictionary cannot give you. Three Cups is an emotional question whatever the individual cards say. No Pentacles at all means nothing practical is being addressed.
The third card is not a prophecy
"Where it is heading" means where this goes if nothing changes. It is a projection of a trajectory, not a fixed point, and reading it as fate is how people end up frightened of a piece of card. If you do not like the third card, that is information about what to change, which is considerably more useful than a forecast.
Reversals: held up, not flipped
A reversed card is rarely the opposite of the upright one. It is more often the same thing blocked, internalised, or not getting through. The Sun reversed is not misery: it is a good thing that is late, or being performed rather than felt.
Say it out loud
Readings that stay in your head get vaguer. Say the three sentences out loud, or write them down, and notice which one made you flinch. That one is the reading.