Why your reading is not effective and what you can do to improve it
Effective ways of reading Non-technical literature
Ever wondered how the same text makes a different impact on different individuals. The easiest way to spot is to see the impact of poems, few get emotional and others feel bored. The time and emotional state of individuals influences the perception apart from their previous memories and knowledge. What if one wishes to get free of this bias and wants to absorb most of what is communicated via the text. What we are going to discuss now is a way of reading that is aimed at capturing the maximum information from the text.
Understanding any writing as a form of communication
Communication in laymen’s terms is nothing but “Sharing information” between two individuals. Even when one speaker is speaking in front of a group of people the communication is still limited between two individuals. The speaker is interacting with each individual, each individual is perceiving the listening to the speaker. Whatever they understand is not the same for the entire group but different for each individual.
While verbal communications have scope to raise questions, look at the figure of speech, mood, and emotional state of the speaker, see the reactions & posture of the speaker during every sentence and phrase. The written information doesn’t contain most of these things and the reader is free to make any sense of the text. There are benefits and drawbacks to this. The benefit is that the author can mention a text that can suit to a wide variety of audiences depending on their maturity state and the drawback is that there is a grey area between what is communicated and what the reader might perceive. To be able to fully grasp what the author intends to convey via the text is simply impossible but there are certain ways in which one can enhance the understanding and minimise the inherent bias of misunderstanding.
Understand the writer
This is the first part of communication. The less you know about the writer the more you find the text boring. Moreover, there will be a lot of scope to miss what they are trying to convey. In order to connect with the writer you should first know about them, their life, background, education, social, religious and political profile. The more you know about any writer the more you will be able to connect to them and the more you will be able to understand. For technical texts, the background information doesn’t necessarily seem to be directly related but for the non-technical texts, biographies, learnings, their fictional and non-fictional texts, the background directly influences their thoughts and writing style. Reading about the author before going into the text is a good practice and if you cannot explore the author on the web then at least spend some time reading about them in the initial pages where they introduce themselves.
Read the title and table of contents
Most of us read the “Title” and almost nobody reads “Table of contents”. What we don’t do is “we don’t contemplate about the title, why was it picked in the first place?” This is important and should be done every time one picks a new text. Nobody selects the title randomly and the title is always significant. It conveys the essence of the entire text that is going to follow. The “Table of contents” stresses on the way the author sees the text evolving. When you miss this step and directly jump to the chapters that follow you miss the thought process of the author. You are entering into a museum created by them without any layout. There are high chances you may miss a section or two and you won’t know if those sections had anything important or not.
Reading “table of contents” also gives you an idea of what each section covers. How the central theme is evolving, how the characters are coming into existence and walking away?
Keep coming back to the central theme
The authors generally take care of it and always stress the central theme but very often the readers indulge in the text and stray away from the central theme. By the time they arrive at the central theme, they lose some critical information. Nobody notices it because they are not writing an exam and not debating about the text with each other. Each one has understood their own meaning which varies with respect to one another. The only way to avoid it is to keep a note of what each paragraph, section, and chapter conveys. Don’t include too much but focus on the core theme of the para, section, and chapter.
Also don’t do multi-tasking. When you are reading, then only read and don’t indulge in other things. It will help in keeping you engaged in the text and not wander into any other thoughts.
Once done reading, revisit the entire timeline
After reading the section, chapter, and the entire text spend one moment to think about the timeline of events that were mentioned. Focus on what you have understood and how it relates to the table of contents and title. Relate how your own notes, highlights, and individual understanding of each section create a similar storyline or a different storyline. If you observe a new storyline as compared to what the author has created then you probably have perceived something different. There are no harms in perceiving something different as long as you are aware that there is a difference between what you have understood and what the author tried to convey.
I wish you happy reading. For more reading practises: Reading strategies that work best
