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Superficial reading — This is when you just read. Don’t ponder the argument, don’t look things up, don’t write in the margins. If you don’t understand something, move on.
What you gain from this quick read will help you later when you go back and put more effort into reading. You now come to another decision point. Now that you have a better understanding of the book’s contents and its structure, do you want to understand it?
Inspectional reading gives you the gist of things.
Sometimes that’s all we want or need. But sometimes we want more. Sometimes we want to understand.
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By the time you finish reading, you’ll have a framework for reading at different levels that you can apply right away.
How We Learn To Read
I bet you already know how to read a book. You were taught in elementary school.
But do you know how to read well?
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This is also known as comparative reading, and it represents the most demanding and difficult reading of all. Syntopical Reading involves reading many books on the same subject and comparing and contrasting ideas, vocabulary, and arguments.
This task is undertaken by identifying relevant pa...
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Mortimer Adler literally wrote the book on reading. Adler identifies four levels of reading:
1. Elementary Reading
2. Inspectional Reading
3. Analytical Reading
4. Syntopical Reading
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Francis Bacon once remarked, “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
You can think of analytical reading as doing that chewing and digesting. This is doing the work. Analytical reading is a thorough reading. If inspectional reading is t...
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The goal of reading determines how you read. Reading the latest Danielle Steel novel is not the same as reading Plato. If you’re reading for entertainment or information, you’re going to read a lot differently (and likely different material) than reading to increase understanding. While many peop...
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This is the level of reading taught in our elementary schools. If you’re reading this website, you already know how to do this.
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We’ve been taught that skimming and superficial reading are bad for understanding. That is not necessarily the case. Using these tools effectively can increase understanding. Inspectional reading allows us to look at the author’s blueprint and evaluate the merits of a deeper reading experience.
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Reading is all about asking the right questions in the right order and seeking answers.
There are four main questions you need to ask of every book:
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“Marking a book is literally an experience of your
differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”
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CURATED FROM
This book explains not just why we should read books, but how we should read them. It's masterfully done.
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More like this
Inspectional reading allows us to look at the author’s blueprint. There are two sub-types of inspectional reading:
Superficial reading is the first step towards analytical reading – that is, understanding and interpreting a book’s contents. If you stop and go over everything you don’t understand on your first reading, you get lost. Sure you finish the book but you’ve lost sight of where you’ve been and where ...
This is used when you’re taking a book that’s notably above your level.
A superficial reading means that you quickly read from start to finish without stopping to ponder the things you don’t understand. The reason this works is that by reading the book from start to finish...
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