How to Read a Book4 Chapter 4 Examine Reading

Only by examining reading can we truly enter the level of reading.

Critical reading requires you to be fairly comfortable reading an author's work, not having to stop to check the meaning of many words, and not getting held back by grammar or structure.

Your goal is to grasp the meaning of the main sentences and chapters.

So, unless you are proficient in basic reading, you can't get to the level of critical reading.

There are two kinds of review reading, and these two are two sides of the same coin, but for a beginner reader, it is best to distinguish between the two as different steps. When you have experience, use it at the same time.

Let's assume that there are two more fairly common factors in this case.

First, you don't know if you want to read the book, or if it's worth it. But you think, or as long as you can dig it up, the information and ideas in the book will at least be useful to you.

Second, let's assume that you want to discover everything, but your time is limited.

In such cases, all you must do is "skim" or read the entire book roughly.

The goal in your mind is to find out if the book is worth the time.

Reading a book in this way with a quick glance will give you an idea of what the author has to say, even if you end up thinking that the book is worth no more than that.

How to go about skimming?

1. Read the title page first, and if it is orderly, read the preface first.

This way, you can basically tell what the book is about and why the author wrote it.

If you want, think about what genre the book should belong to and what books are already included in that genre.

2. Study the table of contents page to give a general understanding of the basic structure of a book.

Usually, a book, especially some discursive books, will have a table of contents, but sometimes a full page of a table of contents will be written in a book or a collection of poems, and many subsections will be added after the volume and chapter to explain the topic.

3. If there is an index in the book, also review it to see what topics are covered in the book, and if you find any of the listed words important, at least look at some of the pages of the text quoted from this term.

In Chapter 8, "Words vs. Meanings", important words refer to the words that the author uses in particular, and the words that bother you in the passage. The so-called special use refers to the same word, which has different meanings in different places; Or different words with the same meaning.

In many books, the promotional copy is the author's best effort to summarize the main idea of the book correctly. Of course, if the promotional copy doesn't write anything about the point, but is just bragging, you can easily see through it.

After completing these four steps, you already have enough information about a book that you can tell if you want to read it carefully or not.

If you feel the need to peruse but don't have the time at the moment, you can put the book aside, but if you have time, you can be ready to actually skim a book.

5. Start a rough reading. In your general or even vague sense of the table of contents of the article, pick a few chapters that are closely related to the topic.

If these passages have a summary at the beginning or end (and many do), read them carefully.

6. Finally, open the book and flip through it casually, read a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages in a row.

Flip through the book in this way, looking for signals of the main arguments at any time, and pay attention to the basic pulsations of attention. Especially in the last two or three pages, many authors rearrange what they think is new and important in the last few pages.

During the whole process, you should think about the structure of the content like a detective, and try to find out the important sentences (arguments) and paragraphs.

Arguments are generally declarative sentences, so we should focus on observation; There are also places where it is more difficult to read, so it is necessary to make marks by borrowing the drawing method. When you read it in the future, focus on understanding. But the most important thing in this process is to control the time.

Now, after a few minutes, or an hour at most, you should know if the book is worth digging into, and what category it should fall into.

There are many ways to classify books, and there is even a book taxonomy. This book mainly divides books into literary works and discourses, and discourses are divided into practical and theoretical essays. But we should also understand how books should be divided according to subject specialization.

The list of good authors has all of us had the experience of having high expectations for a difficult book that we think will enlighten us, only to struggle in vain.

But this is not a mistake, as long as you find the right direction, no matter how difficult the book is, as long as it is intended to be written for the general public, then there should be no reason to be deterred.

What does it mean to be in the right direction? The answer is a very important and helpful reading rule.

The rule is simple: the first time you are faced with a difficult book, read it from beginning to end, and don't stop to look up or think about something you don't understand. Skip the parts you don't understand, and soon you'll read where you understand.

Read the whole book and don't be discouraged or discouraged by an unintelligible chapter, commentary, commentary, or reference. You may know a little more about that place by the second time, but before you do that, you have to read the book at least once from cover to cover.

Most of us are taught to pay attention to what we don't understand, but doing these things when the time is not right will only hinder our reading, not help.

This rule also applies to discursive works. As you try to understand the subtle points, you miss some of the big principles that Smith made so clear.

1. Superficial reading is the beginning of analytical reading, and it is also a method that most people ignore. When faced with a book we are interested in, we tend to get entangled in new words, nouns that we don't understand, and difficult sentences to understand, so as to ignore what a book wants to express as a whole. As a result, when we search for words and nouns, we have exhausted most of our enthusiasm. Before I finished the book, my enthusiasm and interest were exhausted, so I only read part of the book and never wanted to pick it up again.

2. This section can also be understood in this way, when reading a book roughly, you should find someone you understand to read. The reason for emphasizing this point is that although we know that we have to skip what we don't understand, some people (taking me as an example) just don't hit the south wall and don't die, and when they don't understand, they can't help but can't help but want to figure it out. This is very bad. Therefore, although "let go of what you don't understand" and "only read what you can understand", although they express the same meaning, the second statement is more compulsory. It works even more on the "strong seed"! That's why the title of this section is followed by the words "Extremely Important Beginnings."

3. The author has no hint, some works are too different from our understanding of the author, for example, people who have not studied economics read "The Wealth of Nations", most people will be dizzy, if we can complete the painful rough reading stage, we must read it a second time as soon as possible after the basic impressions are all forgotten, and enter the stage of analysis and reading. If you are satisfied with just a cursory reading, and if you don't read it, this impression will be forgotten sooner or later, and it will be worth the loss.

So what is speed reading? We've already talked about those courses that are basically for correctional purposes. But there's more to talk about.

Most people should be able to read a little faster than they can now. Many people read too slowly, and should read faster. However, there are also many people who read too fast and should slow down.

Our focus is really simple. Many books are not worth skimming, while others just need to be read quickly. There are a few books that require a certain speed, usually quite slow, to be fully understood.

The so-called reading speed, ideally speaking, is not only how fast to read, but also fast when it should be fast, and slow when it should be slow. When you look at reading, you read only a small part of the book, and you read it in a different way, with a different goal.

Even for analytical reading, every book, no matter how difficult it is, can be read a little faster in the inconsequential intervals, and the important content can be slowed down a little.

It can be said that the reading speed depends entirely on the value of the book's content to you. By examining Reading 1, we judge the value of a book twice, and in this process we must distinguish whether a book is not worth skimming or whether it is enough to read it quickly. If it is indeed a book that enhances understanding, then it is predictable that this book will definitely take some effort. And the method is: low-value books, read them quickly, don't read worthless books, and only read the part of the books that can be understood? The reader does not explain in detail, but it seems that this is the only way to understand.

As a result, when they read this line, they can only see a single word or a combination of two or three words at most.

To make matters worse, after every two or three lines read, these unskilled readers naturally "regress" to the sentence and line they had previously read.

Luckily, it's easy to break this habit. Once corrected, students will be able to read with the speed of their brains, rather than with the slow motion of their eyes.

No complex tool is as useful as your hands.

You can do this exercise on your own: combine your thumb with your index finger and middle finger and use this "pointer" to move down line by line of words a little faster than your eyes can perceive. Force your eyes to follow the movements of your hands.

Once your eyes can follow your hand, you'll be able to read the words. Keep practicing, keep increasing your movements, and by the time you notice it, you'll be two or three times faster than before.

You'll save a lot of time when you've significantly improved your reading speed. Our hands not only increase your reading speed, but also help you focus on reading.

But concentration does not necessarily equal understanding. A reader must be able to answer many further questions correctly in order to have a higher level of understanding.

The problem with speed reading is comprehension. In fact, you can't understand a book without reading it analytically.

As we said earlier, analytical reading is an essential element of understanding (or understanding) a book.

There is not only one type of reading speed, but the focus is on how to read different speeds, and knowing what kind of speed to use when reading a certain kind of reading.

Super-fast speed reading is a suspicious achievement, and it simply shows that you are reading something that is not worth reading at all.

A better secret ingredient is that when reading a book, it should not be slow enough to be worthwhile, and it should not be so fast that it would be detrimental to satisfaction and understanding. But in any case, reading speed is only a minor issue in reading.

It can be solved with one finger, and if you read a book on the computer, you can solve it with the move of the mouse, and you can mark it at any time.

After skimming, you'll see it all right. In general, even if you want to read a book carefully, you should skim it first and find some ideas from the basic structure.

Finally, when reading a difficult book for the first time, don't try to understand every word. This is the most important rule.

Don't be afraid, or worry that you seem to be reading superficially. Read even the hardest books quickly. When you read it a second time, you'll be ready to read the book.

We've discussed the second level of reading in its entirety, the Critical Reading. We will return to the same topic in the fourth article, and we will mention the importance of review reading in thematic reading.

In any case, you should keep in mind that when we discuss the third level of reading, analytic reading, in the second part of this book, there is still an important function of examining reading at that level. Both steps of the review reading can be used as a preparatory action before you begin to do analytical reading.

The first stage of critical reading—what we call systematic skimming or rough reading—helps the reader analyze the questions that must be answered at this stage.

The second stage of critical reading—which we call superficial reading—helps the reader move on to the second stage of analytical reading. Superficial reading is the first necessary step for the reader to understand the content of the book.