#69: How to read
Do you ever try to read philosophy (or some other stodgy not-designed-for-entertainment text) and find yourself struggling to understand ... well, any of it? Do you finish reading a paragraph and find that you have absolutely no idea what it was about? Does it take you an entire day just to read one chapter? Of course not - you'd never admit to any of it, anyway. Even five-year-olds can read, so there's no way anyone's blowing the lid off your shameful reading troubles. But don't worry. Here's your Imperfectionist friend to lay it all bare and help make reading less of a time-consuming headache. (Spoiler: perfectionism is to blame, again.)
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hey chums, how are you doing? As I’m recording this, I have Grayson, one of our new cats, sleeping on the printer to my right, and Minnow, one of our old ones, sleeping on the sofa behind me. All very lovely and harmonious - for now. But if you happen to hear any screeching, wailing, or the sound of blood spraying onto a microphone, then you can safely conclude that there is room for growth in the area of feline domestic harmony. On the plus side, the fact that this podcast has reached your ears means you can rest assured that I’ve survived the warzone long enough to bring you another instalment of Academic Imperfection.
Ok. I want to do something a little different this time. I want to talk about how to read - specifically, how to read stuff that’s not necessarily written in order to be a gripping page-turner. Stuff that’s not necessarily written with any thought about the plight of the poor reader, who is desperately trying to understand and absorb information while resisting the temptation to look at social media or get a snack or organise their pens. Because, what better time to talk about this? Another academic year is just kicking off: my own teaching begins in a few weeks’ time, and I know that elsewhere, including in the US, the term has already begun. All those students getting stuck in to their assigned reading. For some, depending on the discipline and the stage of study, this might involve reading research papers and academic monographs or edited collections for the first time - rather than textbooks or other readings that aim to present material specifically for the purpose of learning. And, while most of us don’t think of reading as something that’s hard - I mean, it’s so un-hard that we even do it for pleasure, right? - it really can be. If you’re a new student, this can be a nasty shock. I can remember my own experiences in my first few weeks as an undergraduate. I hadn’t studied philosophy before. I was keen and I wanted to do well. I was convinced that all my fellow students were smarter than me and that I’d need to work hard in order to catch up to their level. So, I took the assigned reading seriously. But … things didn’t go very well. Nobody had taught me how to read. Not since I was about three years old, anyway - I mean, if you’ve got into university, you’re probably ok with the whole reading thing, right? Well, maybe some people are, but not me. I did my best, but it turned out that reading philosophy - and, I think, reading any demanding, not-for-entertainment-purposes material - can be a great way to feel anxious and inadequate. When I was a student, I didn’t dare ask around to find out if anyone else was having similar struggles. These days, I sometimes, informally, give my students advice on how to read philosophy and other difficult material - depending on what I’m teaching, we sometimes look at material from psychology, psychiatry, medicine, linguistics, and elsewhere - in an attempt to make things a little easier and less fraught for them. And so, I thought, why not talk about it in the podcast - hopefully offer some pointers and some reassurance, and perhaps help normalise the idea that we’re not done with learning to read by the time we’re five years old, and that especially for people who find themselves having to study quite demanding reading material, there’s a whole new set of skills to learn.
Let me start off by telling you how things went in my case. There’s one experience of reading philosophy that really stands out for me at the start of my time as an undergraduate - and the lessons I learned from it are ones that I continue to apply to this day, and ones that I share with my students too. The set book for my epistemology course in my first term at university was A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic. It’s a very influential book, and if you google it you can find countless summaries of it and video lectures, but there was none of that back when I was an undergraduate. The only way I had to find out what it was about was to read it. So, I tried. It was hard going. I had to go slowly, and then even more slowly, and then re-read slowly bits that I’d already read slowly, in order to understand what I was reading. But, I went so slowly that by the time I’d got to the end of a paragraph, I’d forgotten what was going on at the start of the paragraph. I got through the book, progressing at a rate of maybe 5 or 6 pages an hour, sometimes much less. At one point, I got to the end of a chapter and looked up from my reading so that I could try to summarise to myself what the chapter was about - and I had no idea. It was as if I hadn’t read it at all. I may as well have spent the time watching Home and Away or Brookside or The Word or whatever I was into back in the nineties. I felt as if I’d been concentrating hard enough to make my eyeballs bleed, but that somewhere between my eyes and my memory, what I’d taken in had leaked out and evaporated. I was … dismayed. I thought there must be something wrong with me. This couldn’t be happening to other people, surely. I didn’t tell anyone about it - it sounded too weird. ‘I’ve spent the entire afternoon reading and I can’t tell you even one thing about what I’ve read’. It was so very distant from what I thought time spent studying would be like, where more effort means more knowledge. Like, if you drew a line graph with ‘knowledge’ on the x axis and ‘study time’ on the y axis, you’d get a nice well-behaved diagonal line climbing steadily and neatly across the page. A lot of the time, that’s not the way it is at all.
There’s a couple of things I want to say about that experience. The first is that, as it turned out, there was something wrong with me. I had ADHD, although I wouldn’t be diagnosed until decades later. It’s meant, I suppose, that I’ve had to work harder than some other people to absorb information in cases when I’d rather be doing something else. But, at the same time, I don’t want to over-emphasise the ADHD, and I’m mentioning it here partly to set it aside. The sort of things you end up needing to read if you’re a student or an academic are not written with your entertainment in mind. The better academic writers make some effort to make their points clearly, but that’s not exactly the norm. A lot of academic work is terribly written. Clarity is not always viewed as a necessity for good scholarly writing. So, you don’t need to have ADHD in order for it to be a slog to wring insights out of what you’re reading, or even just to get a vague sense of it. Over the years, I’ve found that the experience I described of struggling to take in anything when reading academic stuff is really not uncommon. My fellow academics joke about it with me and we laugh about things like getting to the end of a page and having no idea what we just read, or about spending hours reading a journal article and then having to go back and read the abstract at the start to get any sense at all of what it was about. My students occasionally mention it too, although more timidly, because like me when I was at their stage, it makes them feel anxious and inadequate.
The other thing I want to say about that unsettling early experience of reading philosophy while failing to take anything in has to do with the reaction of my lecturer when I mentioned it, sort of, obliquely. After I’d been grappling with the reading, we had a lecture on … basically, the main idea behind the book. My lecturer was Richard Francks, at Leeds, himself a brilliantly clear writer and a fantastic teacher. Anyway. At some point towards the end of the lecture I put up my hand and said, ‘I’ve read this book and I ended up with absolutely no idea what it was about, and now I understand, just from this one lecture.’ Which sounds like I was trying to pay him a huge compliment, but actually I felt a bit cheated. I could have saved my time and not bothered with reading the book. He replied with something along the lines of, ‘You probably wouldn’t have got as much as you did out of the lecture if you hadn’t already read the book.’ Which didn’t seem very satisfactory at the time. I’d got nothing out of reading the book, after all. Absolutely nothing.
Actually, though, he was right, and the way in which he was right has shaped the approach I take to reading dense scholarly texts even to this day. (Language, Truth, and Logic isn’t a very dense scholarly text as these things go, but whatever.) What I’ve learned from years of grappling with difficult reading is this: with certain exceptions, which I’ll come back to in a moment, you learn next to nothing from your first reading of a text - at least, that’s how it feels. Seriously. Don’t expect to have anything informative to say about a text you’ve read just once. In fact, you can save yourself a lot of bother and anxiety by getting used to the idea that your first reading of a text is not for increasing your knowledge of what that text says. So, why do it? Well, because your first reading somehow, magically - and seriously I wouldn’t have believed this were possible if I hadn’t actually experienced it many many times - your first reading makes your second reading make sense. You read it once and it washes over you. You have no idea. You take a break and then read it again, and somehow you just end up getting more out of it. It makes more sense, you feel things slotting into place, and you understand some of the stuff that was absolutely impenetrable to you first time round. Not all of it - nobody does that, except maybe people who devote years to writing a PhD or even a career becoming an expert on that one text. But you do end up understanding a respectable amount of it. Certainly enough to have something to say about it in a seminar. That mysterious ramping up of understanding is what was behind the weird experience of sudden, easy enlightenment I had in the lecture I talked about. I’d read the book, understood nothing, then I hear a lecture on it, and suddenly it makes sense. It baffled me at the time, but I’ve put the essence of it to use as the best way I’ve found of understanding something I’m trying to read. I don’t always get to hear a lecture on something I’ve read just one time, of course, so instead I read it a second time. Sometimes a third. With each successive reading, I understand more.
Now, you might be thinking: this is all very nice, but I struggle to find time to read stuff even once - where am I supposed to find time to read it twice, or even three times? And my answer is: you need to read faster. Much faster. It’s natural, when we’re reading something that’s challenging, to slow down so we can take our time to understand it. But, unfortunately, often that’s just a waste of time. We end up slowing down so much that we miss the bigger picture. By satisfying ourselves that we understand this one sentence before moving on, we end up moving through the text so slowly that we’ve forgotten what the last-but-one sentence said, let alone what the overall gist of the paragraph or chapter is. And the way to get past this is to lower your standards. Don’t expect to understand it. Just read it. Let it wash over you. That can be hard to do, I know. There are programs out there that promise to help you read faster - Jim Kwik’s resources are one example - but if you find yourself having trouble moving through your reading quickly, one quick, free, and easy thing you can do is use speed reading software, if you’re reading on a screen. There are loads of resources you can find - the one I tend to use is called Sprint Reader, which comes as an add-on to Google Chrome (they’re not paying me, by the way). Basically, you highlight the text you want to read and the software flashes it up on the screen, one word at a time. You can choose how fast it goes, and you just sit there and look at it. The words keep coming whether you understand them or not. By giving up on the expectation that you’re going to understand what you’re reading on the first read-through, you can get through in 10 minutes something that might have taken you hours or even (if you’re like me) days slogging through it in the old way. After you’ve done that first, speedy read through, take a break. Go and make a cup of tea. Do something else for the rest of the day. Then come back to what you’ve read, and give it another look. You don’t have to race through it this time, but neither should you be crawling through it while demanding 100% understanding either. To give you a sense of what you can expect this time round, imagine that you finish your second reading and someone else - someone, perhaps, who was supposed to read the thing you just read but didn’t - wants you to tell them briefly what it was about. If you’d be able to say one or two sentences about roughly and vaguely what you read, consider it a job well done. I know that probably sounds like a very low bar - but that’s why students have seminars. They’re asked to read something, then they turn up and discuss it with other students and have an opportunity to ask questions. The understanding emerges not simply from having read what they’re meant to read, but from discussing it too. You understand more than you think you do, and that extra understanding isn’t always obvious to you. It’s not always something you’re able to access by sitting back, on your own, having just finished reading something, and asking yourself, ‘Now, what have I learned?’ Very often it comes out only when you discuss it with other people. So, while being able to come out with a couple of vague sentences about what you’ve read might not sound like a good gauge of whether you’ve understood it, it’s better than you think. Trust me.
Ok, what about those exceptions I mentioned? Those times where you can expect to draw a little more understanding from your first reading of a text. Well, those are the times when you’re reading with some end in mind. You have a question that you need to find the answer to. You have an essay to write, and you’re looking for material to quote, or just trying to work out what the author thinks about a particular issue or how they make a particular claim. In those cases, things are much easier. You know what you’re looking for. You’re on a mission. It’s a bit like a Where’s Wally? puzzle (or Where’s Waldo? for my American friends). In those puzzles, you’re looking at a picture and trying to find a very small Wally amid a chaos of stuff that makes Wally difficult to spot. It’s much easier to do one of those puzzles if you can start out by familiarising yourself with what Wally looks like. I imagine, although I’ve never tried, that it’s much more difficult to find Wally if you first have to study the picture, trying to memorise everything in it, and only after a few hours of studying it are you shown what Wally looks like and asked to point to where he appears in the picture. Finding Wally in the usual circumstances - when you know what he looks like - is a SMART goal. Remember SMART goals? They’re ones that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You know what it is that you’re looking for in the picture, it’s designed to be challenging but definitely not impossible, it’s fun (at least, you presumably think so if you’re choosing to do it), you know when you’ve succeeded, and so on. Something similar applies to reading a text when you have a question to answer, or when you’re on some other specific kind of quest. You want to know, say, ‘What does the author claim about X?’ So, you read through, locate the bit (if there is one) where the author talks about X, and you take the time to make sure you understand just that small bit, and you’re done. DOesn’t matter what the rest of the text says. Yay, you’ve finished. Success! On the other hand, when you’re reading something with the open-ended, vague goal of ‘understanding what it’s about’, things are much harder. That’s not a SMART goal. What are the standards for ‘understanding what it’s about’? How will you know when you’ve achieved that? How long is that going to take? Is it achievable in the timeframe you have available? Do you even know what the available timeframe is? And so on. That’s a much less rewarding experience. That’s like poring over the Where’s Wally picture without knowing what Wally looks like, and just trying to memorise the entire picture.
I don’t want to suggest that there’s never any value in reading in a completely open-ended way, without a mission in mind. That’s the way that most of us read for pleasure, after all. Except in very specific and unusual circumstances, we don’t read a novel with the aim of finding out, say, what a particular character is wearing during a particular event in the story. We just read. But in that sort of case, our goal is not ‘understand this’. It’s just ‘enjoy the experience of reading’. And while it’s possible to read philosophy or other scholarly work in that way, a lot of the time we’re trying to understand it too. If you’re a student or an academic, you have stuff to write, deadlines to meet, lectures to give, discussions to have. You need to have some understanding - it’s not all about enjoying the read, although if you’re lucky, there’s sometimes that too. It often happens that, when you’re reading, you don’t have a SMART goal to work towards. You might just have been told to read something in advance of a seminar you need to attend this week. In that case, I want to encourage you to try the method I described of giving the material multiple quick reads while lowering your standards for how much you expect yourself to understand, and to resist the temptation to put yourself through a single, migraine-inducing reading at a snail’s pace. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say that even one quick read is probably better than one slow read, in terms of how much understanding you take away, which is something worth bearing in mind for when you’re really pushed for time. But if you’re reading in order to achieve something specific, like writing an essay or doing a presentation, then lucky you, you’re on a mission. You get to do the reading with a purpose in mind. You can take what you need from the reading and leave the rest. Result.
A big big BIG problem here, though, is that in my experience, students make life a lot harder than they need to. They have the opportunity to work out what their mission is - what essay question they want to answer, for example - and then approach the reading with that mission in mind, but they very often don’t. It’s terrifying. They don’t view themselves as qualified to decide what their mission is until they’ve done the reading. They need to do the reading in order to choose the mission. They don’t know enough yet to make a decision about what they’re going to write an essay about. Perfectionism - because that’s what this is - starts early. And the result is that they meander around, reading aimlessly, imagining that along the way they’ll become enlightened enough to make an informed decision about what they want to write about, which of course they don’t, because aimless reading is not a good way of becoming enlightened, at least it isn’t when you have an essay due in a few weeks. For this reason, I tell students to jump right in and start writing as soon as possible. Have a go at sketching the structure of an essay before you really get into the reading. Draw on your hazy and patchy memories about it from when you studied it, distractedly and imperfectly, during the term. Because that structure you come up with will give you the direction and focus that you need in order to be selective in what you read and in what you draw from what you read. You’ll probably change the structure as you go along, of course, but that’s fine. Just don’t read in an aimless and open-ended way if you can help it - at least, not if you have deadlines to worry about.
That ‘jump right in and start writing as soon as possible’ advice is, I believe, excellent, but even so, I struggle to follow it myself. I know how daunting it can be to start writing about something that you don’t think you know enough to write about. You find yourself feeling that you need to read a bit in order to feel qualified to write, even if what you’re writing, at this stage, is just for yourself. So you end up doing a sneaky bit of aimless and open-ended reading anyway. It’s sort of a comfort blanket. And, that’s fine too. We’re not aiming at perfection here, and doing things to comfort yourself is important even though it’s not part of your essay grade. But just recognise it for what it is. That can be empowering. Recognise that starting out by reading isn’t necessary to be able to start writing, even if you’re using it as a warm-up. Personally, I tend to move back and forth between writing and reading. I write a little bit, find myself wanting to read more about a particular topic, so I do that, then write a bit more. The reading isn’t always necessary, and the process involves lots of diversions down internet wormholes. And the writing moves along in stops and starts. It’s not the most perfectly streamlined efficient way of going about writing, but who cares, I’m not a robot. And neither are you - just think of all those captcha tests you’ve aced.
If you’re about to dive into a load of new, stodgy, unforgiving reading, I wish you luck. I hope that what I’ve said here can make the process a little more comfortable for you, and that perhaps you can learn from some of the mistakes I’ve made along the way. See you next time.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!