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Have you saved a list of recommended books on the wall again in the hope that this time you will read at least one of them? Did you start reading, but gradually realized that you could not understand anything, that after reading there was nothing left in your head?
What to do?
Here are some guidelines.
Target. If you are reading guided by some vague motive such as “for general development”, or “read because you recommended,” “start reading to become well-read,” then you should not hope for understanding and memorization of what you read. It's like starting to learn a foreign language without understanding why you need it. Our mind will not work if it is not clear why it should strain. And reading, even reading a very interesting text, is always stress. Even a very interesting text gradually gets boring, and you have to keep your attention on it by force.
Therefore, do not read just like that, read with a clearly defined goal in mind.
What are you reading? We must not forget that not all texts are equally informative, equally meaningful. All texts can be arranged in a wide range from oversaturated with information to depleted of it, from logical and well-structured, to not logical and loose, from crystal clear to extremely vague. Therefore, you should not think that if you cannot take anything out of the text, then something is wrong with you. It is possible that not everything is in order with the text.
By the way, today there are a lot of completely meaningless texts. Their purpose is to simply grab attention, and the big headlines are followed by just empty words.
Unfortunately, it is very easy to disguise the lack of meaning, lack of information, lack of useful content: break up the text with subheadings, use a question-and-answer form, include bulleted and numbered lists in the text, and even Google can easily make a mistake and mistake empty text for text worthy of top positions. ... Indeed, people cannot always distinguish the situation “the text is very clever, so I don't understand it” from the situation “the text is very stupid, so there is nothing to understand in it”.
Yes, when reading the text, you should always keep in mind the Dr. Fox effect.
Get ready to work. Reading a text (even a very light and interesting one) is always work, it is always a series of efforts. Do not think that you are a flash drive, and reading text is just writing information to it. No, reading the text is an active and laborious process. And not only because your eyes, neck and back get tired.
Believe me, there is no way to learn to understand and remember what you read without effort. Even advanced readers make an effort to highlight the main and the secondary in the text, to reveal its structure, to understand and remember what they read.
Concentration in itself, including focusing on the text, is always an effort. And without concentration, nothing can be understood or remembered. Those who do not want to focus will continue to watch clips, meaningless videos from Youtube and scroll the feed, killing time.
Look for answers. Anyone who has studied foreign languages knows that reading tasks always include questions to him. If you want to understand a text in a foreign language, then you need not just read it, but look for answers to questions in it. The same goes for reading text in your native language.
You must clearly understand why you decided to read this or that text, the answers to what questions you are looking for in it. Be sure to write these questions down. This will help you read the text more carefully and more meaningfully. Be like a top-notch interviewer - don't interview without a pre-prepared list of questions.
Questions that arise during reading should also be written down. Perhaps you will not find answers to them in the text, but it will help you remember this text and, more importantly, it will stimulate your thinking, launch an intellectual search, and expand the horizons of your knowledge.
Reveal structure. It is possible to reveal the structure, to distinguish hidden connections, to structure the incoming information - this is the main function and the main purpose of our mind. When reading the text, you should do exactly this - to identify its structure, highlight key thoughts, emphasize the most important concepts on which the text is based, mark the most significant judgments and conclusions of the author.
And here are some examples of structural elements that good text might include:
1. Dyad (dichotomy, opposition, binary opposition): good - evil, light - darkness, desire for knowledge - ignorance.
2. Tetrad. It is, in fact, a juxtaposition of two dichotomies. A classic example is a tetrad of qualities, on the basis of which Aristotle singled out four elements: hot - cold plus dry - wet. Accordingly, fire is hot and dry, air is hot and humid, water is cold and humid, earth is cold and dry. Usually, a tetrad is drawn in the form of a cross or in the form of a 2 * 2 table.
3. Hierarchy.
4. Sequence of stages.
5. Cycle.
The table of contents, headings, paragraphs are all great help in identifying the structure of the text.
So, after reading the text, its structure should appear in your head - what the author writes about at the beginning, how he continues and how he ends. It is the emergence of such a structure that indicates that you have understood the text and memorized it. As a result of high-quality reading, the text will appear before you as a whole, and you will be able to perceive it not sequentially, as in the process of reading, but all at once.
Highlight key concepts. This operation is so important that I am talking about it separately. When reading the text, it is imperative to mark or, better, write out the concepts that are key for the text. This, by the way, does not mean at all that you need to try to formulate a clear definition of each such concept. It just means that you must clearly distinguish which concepts are key for the text and how they are related to each other.
Of course, if the text contains definitions of key concepts, it is best to write them down.
Draw diagrams. In fact, any good text can be represented as a diagram or multiple diagrams. By a schema, we naturally mean the connections between key concepts. Relationships are, for example, hierarchical, causal, cyclical. The secret is not just to visualize the diagrams in your mind, but to actually draw them. In general, I think that the best synopsis consists of diagrams.
If you outline several texts with the help of diagrams, you will develop a skill, and you will be able to understand, and therefore memorize the texts much better.
Review what you have already read. This recommendation, of course, relates more to reading books. When opening a book on your bookmark, be sure to go back to the beginning of the book, flip through it, refresh your memory of everything that you have already read.
Yes, you should return to reading in such a way that what you read again correlates with what you have already read. In addition, such a periodic return to what has been read is an additional repetition that contributes to memorization.
Of course, you should not scroll automatically, but thoughtfully. Your gaze should periodically dwell on the most important paragraphs, snatch key thoughts, key concepts, key schemes from the text.
Relate the text to what you already know. When reading a text, you should definitely place it in a context that is well known to you, correlate it with other texts, and look for analogies. This is an essential part of actively working on reading comprehension. In this case, you should prefer not casual or superficial connections with what you already know, but essential connections. For example, it is one thing if you simply correlate the four temperaments with the four elements, and it is quite another thing if you identify the essential connection between the concept of the element and the concept of temperament - you will learn that the doctrine of temperaments was born from the doctrine of four body fluids, each of which corresponds to a specific element: bile - fire, blood - air, phlegm - water, black bile - earth.
Reflect on what you read. Good writing is not only a collection of information, it is also food for the mind. A good text always provokes further reflections, triggers an intellectual search. If after reading the text you didn't want to think about anything, you didn't want to look for any information, then you wasted your time. However, sometimes it is necessary to spur the work of your thinking on your own. In any case, gradually it will become a habit for you, and then there will be no unconsidered texts in your life. But be careful: over time, it may turn out that there will be no rash actions left in your life.
Share what you have learned. Do not hold in yourself what you have learned through reading. Be sure to tell about what you read. Friends, relatives, colleagues.
When we try to tell about what we have learned, in our own words, translating into our language and achieving understanding of the partner, we not only repeat what we have read, we begin to understand it better, delve deeper into the material, we begin to distinguish aspects in it that previously eluded us ... Even the ancients noticed that by teaching we ourselves learn - docendo discimus.
Reread. You should not think that there are people who understand any text the first time. Experienced readers are well aware that in some cases, to understand what you read, you have to reread the text over and over again.
Yes, there is no need to hesitate to reread the text as a whole and / or certain parts of it. Of course, rereading by itself does not guarantee either understanding or memorization, but in conjunction with the other approaches outlined here, it will certainly contribute to deepening understanding and improving memorization.
Have a clear reading plan and don't shy away from it. If you have planned that on such and such a day, at such and such hours you will read, then sit down and read. In the formation of any skill, including the reading skill, it is important to be planned, regular, orderly. Therefore, in any case, do not deviate from your reading plan for no good reason.
Eliminate distractions. If you think that you can immerse yourself in reading with enough close attention in conditions when you are constantly distracted (by extraneous noises, other people, etc.), then you are greatly mistaken. Of course, an experienced reader, accustomed to focusing and delving into what he read, can afford to read, for example, in the subway or in a cafe, but you should definitely start improving your reading skills in a calm atmosphere. You should know that for an hour or two while you read, nothing will distract you. I recommend even turning off your phone.
And, of course, no email and social media checking while reading!
Don't get distracted yourself. It happens that, while reading the text, we decide to clarify something, to look at something, thinking that this will help us to better understand what we have read. Yes, it happens that in the process of reading you need the help of a dictionary or Google, but in most cases this kind of distraction only prevents us from immersing ourselves in the text. Therefore, I recommend writing down the questions that arise so that you can look for answers after you complete your reading plan.
Take breaks. If you have a choice - read the entire text in one hour or read the text in parts in one hour and ten minutes (read half an hour, then rest for ten minutes, then read another half hour), you should choose the second option ... The breaks that you take according to the scheme "five through thirty", "ten through thirty", "ten through forty", "fifteen through forty", will not only help you relax your eyes, neck, back, but also help you remember what you read.
And, of course, you need to take short breaks every time you finish reading a completed piece. Read to the end of a paragraph, section, chapter - take a break. These breaks will not only allow you to rest, but will also help to structure the material.
Most importantly, for God's sake, don't take a break from flipping through social media or checking your email. This is not rest, it is the most important factor in latent fatigue. You waste energy thinking that you are resting. You put extra stress on the brain, thinking that you are giving it a chance to rest.
***
So, by following the suggested guidelines, you may well be able to significantly improve your reading skill and get much more benefit from your reading. So go for it. And remember that it is better to read one book, read really high quality, than hundreds of books read, but did not leave a trace either in the mind or in the heart.
What to do?
Here are some guidelines.
Target. If you are reading guided by some vague motive such as “for general development”, or “read because you recommended,” “start reading to become well-read,” then you should not hope for understanding and memorization of what you read. It's like starting to learn a foreign language without understanding why you need it. Our mind will not work if it is not clear why it should strain. And reading, even reading a very interesting text, is always stress. Even a very interesting text gradually gets boring, and you have to keep your attention on it by force.
Therefore, do not read just like that, read with a clearly defined goal in mind.
What are you reading? We must not forget that not all texts are equally informative, equally meaningful. All texts can be arranged in a wide range from oversaturated with information to depleted of it, from logical and well-structured, to not logical and loose, from crystal clear to extremely vague. Therefore, you should not think that if you cannot take anything out of the text, then something is wrong with you. It is possible that not everything is in order with the text.
By the way, today there are a lot of completely meaningless texts. Their purpose is to simply grab attention, and the big headlines are followed by just empty words.
Unfortunately, it is very easy to disguise the lack of meaning, lack of information, lack of useful content: break up the text with subheadings, use a question-and-answer form, include bulleted and numbered lists in the text, and even Google can easily make a mistake and mistake empty text for text worthy of top positions. ... Indeed, people cannot always distinguish the situation “the text is very clever, so I don't understand it” from the situation “the text is very stupid, so there is nothing to understand in it”.
Yes, when reading the text, you should always keep in mind the Dr. Fox effect.
Get ready to work. Reading a text (even a very light and interesting one) is always work, it is always a series of efforts. Do not think that you are a flash drive, and reading text is just writing information to it. No, reading the text is an active and laborious process. And not only because your eyes, neck and back get tired.
Believe me, there is no way to learn to understand and remember what you read without effort. Even advanced readers make an effort to highlight the main and the secondary in the text, to reveal its structure, to understand and remember what they read.
Concentration in itself, including focusing on the text, is always an effort. And without concentration, nothing can be understood or remembered. Those who do not want to focus will continue to watch clips, meaningless videos from Youtube and scroll the feed, killing time.
Look for answers. Anyone who has studied foreign languages knows that reading tasks always include questions to him. If you want to understand a text in a foreign language, then you need not just read it, but look for answers to questions in it. The same goes for reading text in your native language.
You must clearly understand why you decided to read this or that text, the answers to what questions you are looking for in it. Be sure to write these questions down. This will help you read the text more carefully and more meaningfully. Be like a top-notch interviewer - don't interview without a pre-prepared list of questions.
Questions that arise during reading should also be written down. Perhaps you will not find answers to them in the text, but it will help you remember this text and, more importantly, it will stimulate your thinking, launch an intellectual search, and expand the horizons of your knowledge.
Reveal structure. It is possible to reveal the structure, to distinguish hidden connections, to structure the incoming information - this is the main function and the main purpose of our mind. When reading the text, you should do exactly this - to identify its structure, highlight key thoughts, emphasize the most important concepts on which the text is based, mark the most significant judgments and conclusions of the author.
And here are some examples of structural elements that good text might include:
1. Dyad (dichotomy, opposition, binary opposition): good - evil, light - darkness, desire for knowledge - ignorance.
2. Tetrad. It is, in fact, a juxtaposition of two dichotomies. A classic example is a tetrad of qualities, on the basis of which Aristotle singled out four elements: hot - cold plus dry - wet. Accordingly, fire is hot and dry, air is hot and humid, water is cold and humid, earth is cold and dry. Usually, a tetrad is drawn in the form of a cross or in the form of a 2 * 2 table.
3. Hierarchy.
4. Sequence of stages.
5. Cycle.
The table of contents, headings, paragraphs are all great help in identifying the structure of the text.
So, after reading the text, its structure should appear in your head - what the author writes about at the beginning, how he continues and how he ends. It is the emergence of such a structure that indicates that you have understood the text and memorized it. As a result of high-quality reading, the text will appear before you as a whole, and you will be able to perceive it not sequentially, as in the process of reading, but all at once.
Highlight key concepts. This operation is so important that I am talking about it separately. When reading the text, it is imperative to mark or, better, write out the concepts that are key for the text. This, by the way, does not mean at all that you need to try to formulate a clear definition of each such concept. It just means that you must clearly distinguish which concepts are key for the text and how they are related to each other.
Of course, if the text contains definitions of key concepts, it is best to write them down.
Draw diagrams. In fact, any good text can be represented as a diagram or multiple diagrams. By a schema, we naturally mean the connections between key concepts. Relationships are, for example, hierarchical, causal, cyclical. The secret is not just to visualize the diagrams in your mind, but to actually draw them. In general, I think that the best synopsis consists of diagrams.
If you outline several texts with the help of diagrams, you will develop a skill, and you will be able to understand, and therefore memorize the texts much better.
Review what you have already read. This recommendation, of course, relates more to reading books. When opening a book on your bookmark, be sure to go back to the beginning of the book, flip through it, refresh your memory of everything that you have already read.
Yes, you should return to reading in such a way that what you read again correlates with what you have already read. In addition, such a periodic return to what has been read is an additional repetition that contributes to memorization.
Of course, you should not scroll automatically, but thoughtfully. Your gaze should periodically dwell on the most important paragraphs, snatch key thoughts, key concepts, key schemes from the text.
Relate the text to what you already know. When reading a text, you should definitely place it in a context that is well known to you, correlate it with other texts, and look for analogies. This is an essential part of actively working on reading comprehension. In this case, you should prefer not casual or superficial connections with what you already know, but essential connections. For example, it is one thing if you simply correlate the four temperaments with the four elements, and it is quite another thing if you identify the essential connection between the concept of the element and the concept of temperament - you will learn that the doctrine of temperaments was born from the doctrine of four body fluids, each of which corresponds to a specific element: bile - fire, blood - air, phlegm - water, black bile - earth.
Reflect on what you read. Good writing is not only a collection of information, it is also food for the mind. A good text always provokes further reflections, triggers an intellectual search. If after reading the text you didn't want to think about anything, you didn't want to look for any information, then you wasted your time. However, sometimes it is necessary to spur the work of your thinking on your own. In any case, gradually it will become a habit for you, and then there will be no unconsidered texts in your life. But be careful: over time, it may turn out that there will be no rash actions left in your life.
Share what you have learned. Do not hold in yourself what you have learned through reading. Be sure to tell about what you read. Friends, relatives, colleagues.
When we try to tell about what we have learned, in our own words, translating into our language and achieving understanding of the partner, we not only repeat what we have read, we begin to understand it better, delve deeper into the material, we begin to distinguish aspects in it that previously eluded us ... Even the ancients noticed that by teaching we ourselves learn - docendo discimus.
Reread. You should not think that there are people who understand any text the first time. Experienced readers are well aware that in some cases, to understand what you read, you have to reread the text over and over again.
Yes, there is no need to hesitate to reread the text as a whole and / or certain parts of it. Of course, rereading by itself does not guarantee either understanding or memorization, but in conjunction with the other approaches outlined here, it will certainly contribute to deepening understanding and improving memorization.
Have a clear reading plan and don't shy away from it. If you have planned that on such and such a day, at such and such hours you will read, then sit down and read. In the formation of any skill, including the reading skill, it is important to be planned, regular, orderly. Therefore, in any case, do not deviate from your reading plan for no good reason.
Eliminate distractions. If you think that you can immerse yourself in reading with enough close attention in conditions when you are constantly distracted (by extraneous noises, other people, etc.), then you are greatly mistaken. Of course, an experienced reader, accustomed to focusing and delving into what he read, can afford to read, for example, in the subway or in a cafe, but you should definitely start improving your reading skills in a calm atmosphere. You should know that for an hour or two while you read, nothing will distract you. I recommend even turning off your phone.
And, of course, no email and social media checking while reading!
Don't get distracted yourself. It happens that, while reading the text, we decide to clarify something, to look at something, thinking that this will help us to better understand what we have read. Yes, it happens that in the process of reading you need the help of a dictionary or Google, but in most cases this kind of distraction only prevents us from immersing ourselves in the text. Therefore, I recommend writing down the questions that arise so that you can look for answers after you complete your reading plan.
Take breaks. If you have a choice - read the entire text in one hour or read the text in parts in one hour and ten minutes (read half an hour, then rest for ten minutes, then read another half hour), you should choose the second option ... The breaks that you take according to the scheme "five through thirty", "ten through thirty", "ten through forty", "fifteen through forty", will not only help you relax your eyes, neck, back, but also help you remember what you read.
And, of course, you need to take short breaks every time you finish reading a completed piece. Read to the end of a paragraph, section, chapter - take a break. These breaks will not only allow you to rest, but will also help to structure the material.
Most importantly, for God's sake, don't take a break from flipping through social media or checking your email. This is not rest, it is the most important factor in latent fatigue. You waste energy thinking that you are resting. You put extra stress on the brain, thinking that you are giving it a chance to rest.
***
So, by following the suggested guidelines, you may well be able to significantly improve your reading skill and get much more benefit from your reading. So go for it. And remember that it is better to read one book, read really high quality, than hundreds of books read, but did not leave a trace either in the mind or in the heart.
