Learn to Read
Train Your Brain to Absorb Text Like a Writer
Forget everything you know about reading.
I’m exaggerating, I don’t mean everything—please retain enough to read the rest of this article. Forget everything else you think you know. Get in winners, we’re learning to read.
Something I talk about all the time—and touched upon just last week—is how the best (and only) ways to get better at writing (or anything else) are study and practice. Practice means actually writing. Study means reading. I give a lot of advice about writing but I don’t give that much advice about reading. Everyone already knows how to read.
Or do they?
I counted and off the top of my head I know five different ways to read—seven if you count “skimming” and “scanning,” skills they taught kids when I was a kid that I don’t know if they teach anymore and I never use anyway. When you’re a kid in elementary school learning the foundation for all the learning that comes after, you think the things you’re being told are universal and immutable but they’re not. A lot of what I was taught isn’t true anymore or isn’t taught the same way. When I was a kid you knew you went to a disadvantaged school because the pull-down maps at the front of the room still had two Germanys. Today I expect you discern this privilege level based on the number of Sudans.
Also, when I was in school, there were more countries that started with Z and fewer that started with E—two facts that have come up at pub quiz games that ended in tears.
Today’s Shelf Life is on three of the five types of reading I know how to do—the three that are most important for honing your writing skills—what I use them for, and how to do them. (I’m not tackling reading for revision or reading to find errors/proofreading in this article because I’ve covered those in previous articles here and here.) When you want to be a writer everyone tells you to read, read, read. That’s how you study the craft: You read. But you don’t always get a lot of advice on how to read so that you actively absorb the type of information from your reading that will help make you a better writer. All reading is not created equal.
Reading for Comprehension
When you’re in elementary school learning the basics of reading you’re just being taught to match glyphs to phonemes. I mean, we learn to speak and understand speech first (usually) and then reading is tacked on to that. Reading at its most basic: You look at some glyphs, recognize the sounds they represent, and understand the meaning of the word those sounds form. Over time, with practice, you get faster and you can match glyphs up with meanings without the sound step. That’s reading for comprehension. Everyone reading this article has the ability to do that.
This is the first reading you learn to do and it’s the reading you absorb surface information from. When you read an instruction manual, a newspaper article, a street sign, a restaurant menu, you are doing this kind of reading. You are absorbing the meaning of the words for practical use.
If you read Nineteen Eighty-Four and you come away from it with a solid grasp of the plot events in chronological order, an understanding of who Winston and Julia are and what they want, and a sense of Oceania’s government and how it operates, then you have successfully read Nineteen Eighty-Four for comprehension.
I don’t want this to sound patronizing to anyone reading who is saying to themself, “everyone knows this” but not everyone knows this. Pew Research Center reports that 27 percent of adults in the United States—more than one quarter of us!—have not read a single book in the last year. Many people, once they finish their education and leave school, do not read any more books. Wanting to be a writer and being someone who reads books for pleasure don’t always coincide and that’s okay. Anyone who wants to be a writer or improve their writing can benefit from reading more and anyone can do that—even if you are starting from not reading very much or at all.
If you want to brush up on reading for comprehension, start by reading the type of material you want to write and drafting a brief summary afterward. Practice summarizing the information you have absorbed succinctly, covering all the major and important points from the text in logical order. Put your summary aside for a few days and when you come back to it, review it thoughtfully—ask yourself, would someone who has not read the source material get a good overview from this summary? Did you leave anything important out, or include anything that wasn’t really important?
This skill is more valuable than people realize and it’s also harder to do than people realize. It’s a great exercise for training yourself to tune in to the structural elements of what you’re reading so you can begin to imagine how you might structure your own writing from scratch.
Reading Critically
This is the reading that some of us are taught at the high school and college level, depending on the curriculum and how good our teachers are. I think of this as the type of reading I do for the purpose of discussing a book with my book club later. I try to read most writing this way, but when I’m just reading for pleasure and I don’t apply myself, sometimes I don’t do this. That’s fine. You don’t have to read everything critically.
Literary criticism, for those who did not go to university for a very valuable four-year course of study in the language they already speak fluently, is the evaluation and interpretation of literature. One performs literary criticism by picking a literary theory and examining the work being read in terms of that theory. There are dozens of mainstream literary theories to choose from and frankly you do not need to know what any of them are or what they are called unless you are writing a term paper for Dr Shea.
While each school of literary theory uses a different lens to view literature—feminist theory, formalist theory, psychoanalytic theory, new school, et cetera—I tend to have a few particular things from a mix of different theories I evaluate for when I read something this way. I’m usually using elements from new historicism, feminist and queer theories, and formalism for my evaluation. I’m looking at how historical context influences the writing, how the literary preferences of the time during which it was written show themselves, how gender and sexuality affect the story and writing, and so on.
If you read Nineteen Eighty-Four and you come away from it with an understanding of how Orwell perceived the shifting relationships of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes with the rest of Europe during World War II and how he used speculative fiction to draw readers into his perception—for instance—then you have read Nineteen Eighty-Four critically.
To practice reading critically, I make notes while I read, write down the things I notice in the text and, when I finish, I write one or two notebook pages (longhand) of my thoughts and conclusions. If you don’t do this and want to try it out, start by keeping an eye out as you read for one specific thing—for instance, how women are portrayed throughout the book; or how the author uses symbolism; or how the political events of the time during which the book was written affect the plot or story. Make notes as you go to see how many instances you can find of whatever it is you’re looking for. It helps to have a reading buddy read the same book so you can discuss it after you both finish.
Reading Like a Writer
I’m going to be honest with you, this one is really hard for me. This is a type of reading I was never taught to do and had to learn for myself. It’s also the type of reading that I have to apply to the books I enjoy the most, which is when it’s hardest to pay close attention and not be swept away with the story and plot. This is the reading I do when I want to understand how a writer I admire applies the craft of writing.
When I read a book by a successful author whose work I enjoy, and who is writing in a genre I, too, would like to be successful in, I scour each page for the secrets of how they write. I am looking to see how characters are introduced; I am looking to see how the writer gives me information without spelling it out for me; I am looking to see how they fit exposition into dialogue and flashback; I want to understand why I react to each character the way I do—why is this character likeable, why does that character make me so mad, why do I find myself enjoying this third character in spite of myself? How does JKR make us hate Umbridge so viscerally? How does Leigh Bardugo end every chapter with a compelling cliffhanger so you can never put her book down? How did Margaret Atwood construct a novel inside a novel inside another novel like a matryoshka?
This is the level of reading that will elevate your writing game. When people say “if you want to get better at writing, you have to read!”—this is what they mean. This is the active study of writing techniques in situ so you can learn them and steal them for your own work. Remember, plagiarizing is bad. Stealing literary techniques is great and I encourage it.
If you read Nineteen Eighty-Four and you come away from it with an understanding of how to create the impression of a fictional language (like Newspeak, or Nadsat, or Lapine) and use it as a tool to immerse the reader in your setting while simultaneously reminding the reader how alien that setting is to what they’re used to, then you have read Nineteen Eighty-Four like a writer.
My best advice for reading like a writer: Train yourself by rereading books you have already read and enjoyed. Begin with a technique you would like to acquire. For instance: I want to get good at telling the reader what my characters look like without falling back on terrible tropes like “woman considers her appearance in the mirror” or “man describes his love interest’s beauty in great detail.” Next, think of a writer you know who does this well. Whose characters are so vividly and skillfully described that you picture them clearly but don’t remember how the writer slipped the image into your mind? Finally, go back and read this writer’s book (or books) again. Go slowly, keeping your eyes peeled for character descriptions. Make a note of every instance you find and then, when you’re done, look for the patterns.
Taken together, these three methods of reading represent a tremendous investment of time and energy in reading—at least, while you’re learning to do them. I spend a lot of time re-reading passages after realizing I got carried away and stopped focusing on the writer’s techniques. When that happens, those are the passages you have to pay the closest and most careful attention to, because the ability to write a scene so engaging that your reader gets carried away is the greatest writing skill of all.
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