Advice for students: Slow down and read
When it comes to reading, lifehacking tends to focus on speed — more words, fewer minutes. That might be fine if reading is understood as a matter of moving information with maximum efficiency from the page to the brain. The faster the connection, so to speak, the better.
But there are other kinds of reading. No one can race through a poem by Emily Dickinson or a short story by James Joyce and take away very much from the experience. Therein lies a problem for students reading literary works. On the one hand, there’s the impulse to get through an assignment, to knock off a poem or story and move on to another task. On the other hand, there’s the poem or story, the kind of text that invites and rewards patient attention.
My advice: slow down. Here’s what the poet Ezra Pound says about reading literature: “no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.” Or consider this exchange between Oprah Winfrey and the novelist Toni Morrison: “Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?” “That, my dear, is called reading.” Or as the poet William Carlos Williams says in the poem “January Morning,”
I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can’t understand it? But you got to try hard –
And here’s the novelist Zadie Smith, in an interview, likening the reader of literature to a musician learning a piece of music,
an amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.
Taking the time to slow down — marking a passage, pondering a detail, looking up a word, writing down a question, changing your mind, looking at the page in a way that allows you to begin to notice what’s there — might change, for keeps, your idea of what it means to read literature. Slowing down will also help you begin to understand how it is that some people seem to see so much in what they’re reading. They know that reading well sometimes means taking your time.
Michael Leddy teaches college English and blogs at Orange Crate Art.
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Comments
Bob says on August 21st, 2007 at 10:06 am
Excellent advice!
I use a little stack (about 5 or 6) 3″x5″ index cards as a bookmark when I read.
That way, whenever I read a passage I want to remember I write it on one of the cards then file that card away replacing it with a blank. I do the same with a thought provoked by the text.
One thought, or one quote, per card.
The other thing I do sometimes is scan the front cover of the book and print that onto one side of the cards - looks nice and saves writing the book details on each card
TheZenDollar says on August 21st, 2007 at 11:03 am
I love it! It only took me one work of Heidegger to fully understand how important this really is. Making notes in the margin is extremely helpful as well.
Myrthe says on August 22nd, 2007 at 6:23 am
Thank you so much for this post, Michael!
After reading so many posts on blogs about speedreading, it so refreshing and important to find a post about the importance of reading slowly (or at least at a normal pace).
While I see the point of speedreading in some circumstances, reading books is over and above anything else I think, something to enjoy, to savor and to learn from. This aspect of reading is always missing in the posts about speed-reading. Thank you for reminding us of it!
Wil says on August 22nd, 2007 at 10:33 am
Good advice. The Toni Morrison/Oprah conversation is a little annoying, however. Oprah was referring to sentences of Morrison’s that simply don’t make sense.
Snakk3 says on August 23rd, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I dont agree. I mean, a poem or other “spiritual like” text should be read not fast, just to feel it. but to study, understand a text, or a simple information text can and should be read very fast. Sometimes when whe (students) are studying we read so slowly and re-ready the words again and again forcing it to enter in our brains. but if you train your mind to read fast, with practice you can read things really fast and capture everything.
some people say that our brain can’t capture so much information in such little lapse of time, but an example of that is the information that we capture when seeing a movie.
maybe i said some mistakes, but if you want to learn more about it, search for “ramon campayo” on google or on a library.
Lia says on January 31st, 2008 at 3:32 am
Snakk, you might learn to superficially comprehend everything while you’re reading quickly, but you won’t “capture” it. You won’t remember it because it won’t have enough time to sink in. That’s why it’s usually better to read texts, or anything really, slowly. You want to be able to get as much out of it as you can, and you can’t do that when you’re flying without pause from one line to the next, without really giving yourself time to deeply consider each idea before moving on.
As for absorbing everything in movies, that is completely false. First of all, movies are all about visuals, which can show you everything in a single instant, just like a painting. And guess what? Just like in a painting, the first time you see it you DON’T absorb it all. You’d like to think you do, but you don’t. Try re-watching a movie you’ve only seen once and you’ll be surprised at just how much you didn’t see the first time, or didn’t have time to fully process and so forgot. Sometimes, the first time I see a movie, I will be intently focused on one person’s facial expression and miss the expression of the person next to them, or miss something going on in the background. I won’t realize it until future re-watchings. You simply can’t focus on everything the first time while it’s flashing by. You will capture the basic, surface things, those the camera focuses on, but you can’t always see the nuances and subtleties going on in the peripheral of that focus. The same goes for reading. Yes, it seems logical that if you read each word, even at a fast speed, technically you shouldn’t miss anything, but that’s actually not how our brains work. We can’t truly absorb every idea unless we take time to think about it — thinking about it is the only way it will truly stick and expand in our minds. The more you think about it, the longer it will remain in your memory. So speeding through completely defeats the purpose of reading, because you may completely miss the underlying points, not to mention the poignancy. Reading can’t be nearly as thorough or enriching when you do that.