The Art of the Power Scan...Who needs to learn how to read?
After all, we all learned how to read fairly early in life, usually in elementary school, right?
But do you know how to really read?
More importantly,
are you really reading?The ancient Greeks had a label for those who were widely read but not well read—they called them sophomores.
Scanners and Pleasure SeekersWe know that people don’t read well online. They ruthlessly scan for interesting chunks of information rather than digesting the whole, and they want to be entertained in the process. This is the reality that online publishers deal with, so we disguise our nuggets of wisdom with friendly formatting and clever analogies.
But that doesn’t mean you should read that way.
Information vs. UnderstandingPeople often think of learning as an information-gathering and retention process. But being able to recall and regurgitate information is low-level learning compared with insightful understanding.
For example, next time you read a challenging blog post and you’re not clear on a point, your first inclination might be to ask a question in the comments. Instead, read the post again. If it’s still not clear, go do some research on your own to see if you can figure it out. Then when you finally do ask a question, you’re on an entirely different level of understanding and can likely engage in a meaningful dialogue with the author.
Instruction is important and beneficial.
But true understanding comes from your own exploration and discovery along the path.
The Four Levels of Reading
Back in 1940, a guy named Mortimer J. Adler jolted the “widely read” into realizing they might not be well read with a book called
How to Read a Book. Updated in 1973 and still going strong today, How to Read a Book identifies four levels of reading:
ElementaryInspectional
Analytical SyntopicalEach of these reading levels is cumulative. You can’t progress to a higher level without mastering the levels that come before.
1.
Elementary Reading – Aptly named, elementary reading consists of remedial literacy, and it’s usually achieved during the elementary schooling years. Sadly, many high schools and colleges must offer remedial reading courses to ensure that elementary reading levels are maintained, but very little instruction in advanced reading is offered.
2.
Inspectional Reading – Scanning and superficial reading are not evil, as long as approached as an active process that serves an appropriate purpose. Inspectional reading means giving a piece of writing a quick yet meaningful advance review in order to evaluate the merits of a deeper reading experience.
There are two types:
Skimming: This is the equivalent of scanning a blog post to see if you want to read it carefully. You’re checking the title, the subheads, and you’re selectively dipping in and out of content to gauge interest. The same can be done with a book—go beyond the dust jacket and peruse the table of contents and each chapter, but give yourself a set amount of time to do it.
Superficial: Superficial reading is just that… you simply read. You don’t ponder, and you don’t stop to look things up. If you don’t get something, you don’t worry about it. You’re basically priming yourself to read again at a higher level if the subject matter is worthy.
Stopping at inspectional reading is only appropriate if you find no use for the material.
3. Analytical Reading – At this level of reading, you’ve moved beyond superficial reading and mere information absorption. You’re now engaging your critical mind to dig down into the meaning and motivation beyond the text. To get a true understanding of a book, you would:
Identify and classify the subject matter as a whole
Divide it into main parts and outline those parts
Define the problem(s) the author is trying to solve
Understand the author’s terms and key words
Grasp the author’s important propositions
Know the author’s arguments
Determine whether the author solves the intended problems
Show where the author is uninformed, misinformed, illogical or incomplete
You’ll note that the inspectional reading you did perfectly sets the stage for an analytical reading. But so far, we’re talking about reading one book. The highest level of reading allows you to synthesize knowledge from a comparative reading of several books about the same subject.
4. Syntopical Reading – It’s been said that anyone can read five books on a topic and be an expert. That may be true, but how you read those five books will make all the difference. If you read those five books analytically, you will become an expert on what five authors have said. If you read five books syntopically, you will develop your own unique perspective and expertise in the field.
In other words, syntopical reading is not about the existing experts. It’s about you and the problems you’re trying to solve. In this sense, the books you read are simply tools that allow you to form an understanding that’s never quite existed before. You’ve melded the information in those books with your own life experience and other knowledge to make novel connections and new insights. You, my friend, are now an expert in your own right.
Here are the five steps to syntopical reading:
1. Inspection: Inspectional reading is critical to syntopical reading. You must quickly indentify which five (or 15) books you need to read from a sea of unworthy titles. Then you must also quickly identify the relevant parts and passages that satisfy your unique focus.
2. Assimilation: In analytical reading, you identify the author’s chosen language by spotting the author’s terms of art and key words. This time, you assimilate the language of each author into the terms of art and key words that you choose, whether by agreeing with the language of one author or devising your own terminology.
3. Questions: This time, the focus is on what questions you want answered (problems solved), as opposed to the problems each author wants to solve. This may require that you draw inferences if any particular author does not directly address one of your questions. If any one author fails to address any of your questions, you messed up at the inspection stage.
4. Issues: When you ask a good question, you’ve identified an issue. When experts have differing or contradictory responses to the same question, you’re able to flesh out all sides of an issue, based on the existing literature. When you understand multiple perspectives within an individual issue, you can intelligently discuss the issue, and come to your own conclusion (which may differ from everyone else, thereby expanding the issue and hopefully adding unique value).
5. Conversation: Determining the “truth” via syntopical reading is not really the point, since disagreements about truth abound with just about any topic. The value is found within the discussion among competing view points concerning the same root information, and you’re now conversant enough to hold your own in a discussion of experts. This is what the “online conversation” was supposed to look like according to early bloggers, and sometimes, it does. But mostly, the online conversation looks like the unqualified, unsubstantiated opinions of the ill-informed, and you’re not looking to be part of that scene.
Be a Demanding Reader
Reading, at its fundamental essence, is not about absorbing information. It’s about asking questions, looking for answers, understanding the various answers, and deciding for yourself.
If you think all of this sounds like a lot of work, well… you’re right.
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About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger.
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MORE: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Link to full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
Excerpt:
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”
Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Source: The Atlantic, July/August 2008. Nicholas Carr’s most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published earlier this year.
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NOTE TO SELF: Remember to read - not scan - the Opening Chapter of The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders - before the Retreat this weekend.
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"Keeping A Close Eye on the Candidates" 
