The Art of Reading
A guide to improve your reading and comprehension abilities
Reading is like art. Once you learn how to read properly and practice it, reading then becomes much easier and smoother. Just like any art, however, there are some things that consist the art of reading. In this article, I offer six tips I have discovered over the years that can highly improve your reading capabilities.
1. Pay attention to the punctuation marks
Very often, a reader, on his hurry, does not pay attention to the punctuation that exists in the text. When the reader doesn’t pay attention to the punctuation, however, he reads the text not in the way that the author writes it and wants you to read it, but in a different one. Because of this, you may end up misunderstanding what the author is writing, or even not understand him at all, getting the impression that the author has nothing to say. But the point is to understand what the author is trying to say, and punctuation is there to make, as possible as this can be, the writing alive and clear.
2. Slow reading
One of the biggest mistakes I have noticed very often is reading a text very fast. This is not surprising. In today's society, there are so many things that cross our devices, particularly through social media, that we simply want to read everything that appears on our screens. Not paying attention to the punctuation of the text also results to fast reading, since punctuation demands you to stop and make pauses. But why is reading very fast a bad thing? The simple answer is: because you just read the text; you do not study it, you do not try to understand it, you do not let it make you think. I am convinced, however, that the classic motto ‘quality is better than quantity’ still holds true. Yes, slow reading might make you read less, but it is better to know X things and know them well enough instead of knowing X+500 things and not really knowing them. Something, by the way, schools and universities tend to forget nowadays with their vast and almost fixed curricula.
3. Conscious reading
Conscious reading means to be aware of what you read—to be aware of what you understand and what you do not; when and why you have lost your concentration and when you are present. A necessary requirement for this is, first of all, to be sober: mentally and bodily. You have to be calm when you read. Your mind must not be bothered by other thoughts. If there is something bothering you, you should first resolve that thing, and then go on reading — unless you are interested to read something which is about the thing that you are bothered by. As a matter of fact, I have realised, if you don’t have an interest about what you are reading, then most probably you will find the text quite boring.
An indication that one might not be conscious of what they are reading is the case of not realising the slips of the tongue that they are doing. What do I mean by slip of the tongue? Usually, when we refer to slip of the tongue, we refer to the case that incidentally you say something different from what you intended to say. In this case, however, I refer to the case that the reader reads something different from what is written in the text: either a whole phrase, a word or, quite often, even skipping some words without reading them at all.
Making a mistake of this nature is not something rare and actually happens to everybody. Only the fact that you slip what you read does not prove that you are not conscious. The difference though, between the person who is conscious and the person who is not, is that the person who is conscious will immediately realise, in the next few seconds, that he slipped something, because he will notice that the rest of what he is reading does not make sense using the false word he just slipped. The unconscious reader, on the other hand, does not realise it and keeps on reading.
Since I consider conscious reading something to be very important, I must mention one more prerequisite for it. You have to be honest with yourself, and in order to do that, you must be humble. To give you a brief example, a friend of mine once read a passage from Nietzsche and after reading it (without applying any of these reading rules) he said: “what a bunch of stupid things this guy says!” Of course, what he read could have been indeed a bunch of stupid things. But the impression that I got was that, most probably, he didn’t understand a single line of what Nietzsche wrote and immediately became defensive, blaming the text of being empty of content instead of admitting to himself that he did not understand what he was reading.
4. Do not read too much
How much is too much? I cannot say. This depends on each person. But you should read as much as you can handle — how much you can handle, I can assure you, changes the more you are accustomed to proper reading. Do not read too little, but not read too much either. It is much better to read two things and understand them properly, than to read ten things and understand nothing. After all, you read for your own benefit, not to get yourself exhausted. Remember there are always the following days to continue.
5. Take your time
This is probably the most important thing while you read a text: take your time. Reflect on what you read. If you have read something which you found valuable, then reflect on that and, most importantly, let it influence you and inspire you. Think of it in terms of working out: there are plenty of good exercises for the body, but if you do only one repetition of them, most probably you will not see any significant results.
Bonus tip: Get a hard copy
Today, for better or worse, everything is becoming digital. This, of course, increasingly applies to reading too. But here I insist: medium is indeed the message. Ideally, I would prefer my readers to print my work and read it on paper too, instead of reading it on screen.
The reading experience of reading a digital text is not the same compared to reading a text on paper. The goal of reading is to be only us and the author, with no distractions; almost like a therapy session. Therefore, get yourself relaxed with a clear mind and find a nice and relatively quiet place to read. That place can be a library, a park, your balcony or any other place you find comfortable for a good reading experience. But be only you and the writer. Do not get your phone with you and if you do, my suggestion is to put it in flight mode.
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These are the most important rules that I think consist the art of reading. This article is by no means complete. There is always more about it and probably the art of reading itself is something you always keep learning. We should never forget that when we read something, we are interacting with the thoughts of another person, which means that it takes effort to thoroughly understand what we read. The more the author thinks like us — both in content and style — the easier we understand him, and vice versa. In any case, by following and testing the above rules yourself, I can assure you that you will see a substantial difference. You only need to have some patience.
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I found you while reading Lloyd Alter. Your advice here to print out your articles seems antithetical to reducing our carbon footprint.
Hey Hi .. I read the story. Very well written and succinct in terms of improving reading (comprehension) skills. Not sure what context it has to our earlier conversation. However, thanks for sending it. A good read.