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Do you have particular strategies for reading and understanding text?

emanningis

How do you read and interpret text? (such as books or articles) 

I briefly describe aspects of how I do it below:

  • I always thought of myself as a slow reader, possibly with low working-memory as well (i.e. ability to remember most recent things).
  • It seems my mind works by remembering and questioning way too much, so the working memory is sort of overloaded.
  • When I'd compare to others, I'd generally be noticing useless details of the text: typos, repeated words or paragraphs.
  • To cope with this limitation, I resorted to mind maps, highlighting, rewriting, and also memorising.
  • These days, a technique that seems to help is to use either a glyph / drawing, or a short sentence per paragraph of text, and at the end writing a synthetic version myself (a new text).

I wonder how it is for you?

  • My one word answer would be 'slowly'. I don't see this a failing. On the contrary, far too many academics these days read quickly, widely, and superficially. Far better to identify the really important texts and read them slowly and deeply (i.e. lots of notetaking and lots of questioning).

  • I’m a terrible reader, except for text books. Why? Because I was taught as a young ADHD reader how to scan pages.

    1. Look for headlines
    2. Look for subheadings
    3. Check out any bold or italicized words, then read the text around it.
    4. Read the text in-between to gather any additional info.

    That tactic helped me get through high school and college at least lol. I struggle with novels because they don’t use this kind of layout.

  • I am a relatively fast reader. From the mistakes I tend to make, I have recognised that I use word shape and the initial and final letters to ascertain what any word is. I believe that this is a common method. This makes reading very fast and easy, at the cost of the occasional mistake.

    For novel words, I tend to use mnemonic phrases. I can still remember the name of a membrane protein that acts as a potassium transporter (and is an antibiotic) from my undergraduate zoology forty years ago. It is called valinomycin. I am a big Tolkien fan, so remembered it as Valinor my sin - from Morgoth's destruction of the trees of Valinor, Telperion, the Silver Tree, and Laurelin, the Gold Tree.

  • This sounds a clever and interesting adaptation to help yourself. It must be quite time consuming and effortful.

    Most text contains lots of words, but few concepts. It is why they can be summarised and shrunk down. Most is detail to expand, support and illustrate a point. I think you are not really supposed to think about every word. I am a little slow. I also have a habit of reading sentences multiple times.

    You may find if you read something quickly without worrying too much, you get the main points.

    In a lot of magazine articles the first and last paragraphs are enough to decide if it is worth reading the rest.

  • I too see myself as a slow reader. I think I read as if reading aloud, as I hesitate if it doesn't make sense. I also notice typos. If I come across an item of news for example and wonder about something related to that news, like where the place is or what something involved, I have to research to find out. That is one thing that the internet is useful for. I understand that most people don't do this. To me this gives a full picture and educates too.

    I do occasionally scan a piece of writing, usually if it is long and I may not be interested. I tend to mainly read short posts on here, as the long ones look like there is too much info. to take in, especially if I need to look up a word.