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Skipping pages?
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14-02-2011 10:08pm#1
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Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,245 CMod ✭✭✭✭
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I normally read fiction relatively fast, without skipping pages.
This approach changes when reading something highly conceptual, like theory, philosophy, or peer-reviewed scholarly journals. For example, awhile back I was reading The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida, and found that if I attempted to understand each paragraph as it occurred in order, reading page-by-page in linear fashion, at times I would get bogged down in a detail, and miss the larger meaning of a chapter.
Now I tend to first read the chapter introduction (or journal article abstract), then skip back to the chapter summary, before returning to where I skipped earlier after the introduction. I then breeze through the chapter body, not allowing any particular detail to stall me, merely noting (*) that detail in the margin, before zipping to the end. Often, after doing this, the larger context of the chapter or article elucidates the detail I did not understand when first encountering it. If not, then consulting comparative sources (e.g., web searches) often helps.
After saying all this, there was a time when I would skip most of the pages of a story. A couple years back during a 4-year programme held across the pond, in addition to my course of study (i.e., major), I was required to take several classes to fulfill the general education requirement for the degree.
One such class was fictional literature, and the syllabus called for reading about six assigned short stories from an anthology as homework before class, and then upon entering class, the professor would randomly select one of the six stories, and expect us to write a summary essay in 20 minutes.
Rather than read the assignments before class, I would arrive completely unprepared. When the randomly selected story was announced, I would first read the first two pages of the story, then roughly approximate where the the middle two pages of the story occurred, read those, then flip back and read the final two pages of the story. I would then write upon any idea that struck my imagination, supporting it with only the 6 pages read, skipping the remaining pages entirely. I always got top grades on my essays, often with comments by the professor as to the uniqueness of my story interpretation.
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Yes, I had to do it in University. I would usually have a reading backlist of around 8-10 books that I had to read in relatively intense detail while also conducting primary research in archives and diaries/letters. Its quite intense. The only way you can through it in such a short space of time is to get a copybook and skim to the relevant sections to take notes. You can understand an historians POV from reading maybe 10% of the book.
That said, when I wan't pressed for time I would always read the book in a linear fashion, cover to cover. Other times I would read whole chapters at a time, moving on to different books. This was mainly because my historical interests are quite fickle, one week I may be interested in mid 18th century French cultural history, next I might be obsessed with the anarchy of King Stephen's Kingdom of England.
And they say the age of the generalist is dead
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Yes, I had to do it in University. I would usually have a reading backlist of around 8-10 books that I had to read in relatively intense detail while also conducting primary research in archives and diaries/letters. Its quite intense. The only way you can through it in such a short space of time is to get a copybook and skim to the relevant sections to take notes. You can understand an historians POV from reading maybe 10% of the book.
And they say the age of the generalist is dead
I can sympathise with this. But isn't there a difference? At University level you're not really expected to read the books fully are you? When researching it would be unimaginable for me to read the book; I simply do not have the time so instead I extract the information from the book(s) but wouldn't count it as read.
Maybe your style's different to mine.
Although my college style of quickly skimming a page for information has leaked to my normal-out-of-college style of reading. I'm reading too quick and forgetting what's in the paragraphs. Then when something that's blatantly predictable/obvious happens and I didn't see it, I look like an idiot!
Anyways, thanks for the contributions folks, interesting replies.0 -
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