Consider for a moment the volume of written material you consume on a daily basis – the emails and text messages, articles and blogs, advertisements, news reports, maybe the odd book, maybe many. You feel safe in assuming you can read – pretty confident, in fact. You pass a road sign, a billboard, and at a glimpse, the symbols express to you, without any conscious effort, a meaning. A communication was made to you, which you received. You will take the exit to the home you bought based on the billboard that proclaimed, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.” So, you can read. That’s enough evidence to prove it. But how well can you read?
You, like most of us who can read, passed from illiteracy to literacy at a young age, a major feat accomplished in stages. From birth until about the age of six or seven – the first stage – you became equipped to learn how to read. You demonstrated that you could absorb and remember a word and the individual letters that made it, point to a person or object and provide the appropriate label, show that you could speak clearly, cobble together sentences, and use them in the right order. What you did was master baby talk.
In the second stage, usually the first year of elementary school, you learned to read basic texts and amassed a vocabulary of about 300 to 400 words. You came to recognize context to help understand the meaning of words and developed the ability to read simple books on your own. Green Eggs and Ham fell well within your grasp.
A little sprinkle of magic also happened during this time. That glimpse of a billboard where symbols instantly and effortlessly imparted meaning is a faint echo of it. There was a moment when, as children, we saw only the black and white on a page – letters and words that were meaningless to us. But within an impressively short time – two or three weeks – meaning broke through. Exactly how this happens, despite a few millennia of conjecture – remains a mystery.
In the next stage, you build vocabulary and improve your ability to recognize the meaning of words based on context. You become aware of the various subject matter available to read. And you come to appreciate that you can read independently, outside of school.
Then in the last stage, you refine and enhance the reading skills you’ve acquired. You learn to compare different reading material, to compare the thoughts and opinions of different writers. By your early teens, you have developed sufficient reading ability to tackle the majority of written material you will encounter in your life.
These stages occur during the first level – the elementary level – of reading ability. However, there are three more levels to go, three more levels that many of us will never experience, most of us are not even aware of. We pass through life reading all that interests us (and much that doesn’t) in the mistaken belief that we are “mature” readers. How could we not be? When you take into account the years of experience, the volume of material consumed, the fact that we own shelves of books, that we’re in a book club… But for many of us, we have read all that we’ve read in life with no more ability than what we had before starting high school.
By that time, you should have achieved an eight or ninth grade literacy – enough to be prepared for high school work. While you did prove yourself capable of reading independently and learning on your own, you proceeded no further. Instead of being a mature reader, you remained a solid elementary reader, with enough skill to read superficially; perhaps, with some ability to extract more from what you read than when you were younger – the accumulated benefit of many years of reading a few good books – but without the skillset to read a book actively, to understand it thoroughly, to learn from it. You are not, in fact, a mature reader. You’re probably googling things like, “Is War and Peace hard to read?”
So, what are the three levels you’re missing?
Inspectional reading is the first, the level that follows elementary reading. It examines the surface of the book using a form of systematic skimming. Instead of beginning to read straight from page one, the reader examines the contents (assuming it’s non-fiction), reads the preface if there is one, scans the index. The intention is to learn what kind of book it is; what is the structure of the book, and what parts make it up. If the book survives this initial inspection, you read further by identifying subjects of interest in the index and referring to the pages to read a paragraph or two, or by reading the first page, or by reading the ending, to get a sense for the writer’s conclusion from his closing statements. All of this is done while keeping an eye on the time you invest. You want to learn as much as you can about the material in as short a time as possible. Inspecting the book in this way should answer the question, “What is this book about?”
Analytical reading is the next level. After a thorough inspection of a book, one that offers more than simple entertainment or facts and information, you decide to read it. Now you want to get everything out of the experience you can, all that you are capable of getting out of it. You read the material as thoroughly as possible. You ask a lot of questions. The process is intensely active, demanding. This is no beach read. You read for the sake of understanding, to learn, to digest. You want to answer the question, “What does this book mean?”
The final level is called syntopical reading. It expects the reader to have read many books and to place the one being read in relation to the others and to whatever subject area they encompass. But it doesn’t stop at simple comparison. It demands that the reader construct an analysis and perhaps draw conclusions that may not be found in any of the books. It’s the most difficult and rewarding of all levels of reading.
*
The overall decline in reading ability in the US is nothing new. Our education system has struggled for decades to identify the best methods to teach children how to read and to instil enthusiasm in them to read later in life. Beyond elementary school, however, little effort is made to teach reading at a higher level. We are left to fend for ourselves.
For those who go on to higher education, a lack of skill reveals itself in struggles with the curriculum and, in recent years, with a dumbing down of the curriculum. The impact of the Internet has been to demand less in many ways of the reader. While there is an abundance of material available to us online, the skills required to consume it appear minimal. But, in fact, the need for superior reading skills could not be more urgent. Greater reading ability would go a long way to prevent the kind of ignorance and misunderstanding that generates unfortunate outcomes, like muddled political opinions or the belief in conspiracy theories.
The benefits of reading well, that is, to read actively for understanding, requires effort, but it is immensely rewarding. It opens new possibilities for learning; it provides a lifetime of education. As a confident, “mature” reader, you won’t shy away from demanding books, or, consequently, demanding ideas. You won’t check online to see if a book is “hard to read.” War and Peace, by the way, is a challenge to read. But it’s worth it.