Reading Tip: Aim for Understanding, Not "Reading"
Reading Tip: Aim for understanding, not “reading.” The goal is not to read every word, but to understand what the author is trying to communicate.
In my previous post, I shared my overall reading advice for students who want to spend less time reading while getting more out of what they read. Now I want to follow up with the most important mindset shift to make when you are moving from high school to college reading assignments.
The goal of a reading assignment is not simply to read all the words from beginning to end and take scattered notes on random elements that you think might be important.
Instead, the goal is to uncover the author’s argument, and be able to restate that argument briefly in your own words.
How do you know when you have understood? When you can describe what it’s about, what the author’s main claim is, and give three or four examples of the most important evidence the author used to make their point. Usually this is all that is required of a reading that has been assigned in a college class. Remember, scholarship is about different voices talking with one another, and it is more important for you to have a summary understanding of an argument so that you can compare different viewpoints.
The problem is, an author’s argument is typically couched within a lot of other writing—an introduction, theoretical background, evidence paragraphs, long tangents, counter-arguments, and other trappings of formal academic writing.
Your job as a student is to cut through the mass of words and see the argument underneath. But how do you do that? I’m going to give you three steps to follow that will help you understand a reading passage without reading it, in the traditional sense. After explaining each step, I will give you examples of how to apply it in practice. If you practice and become familiar with these three steps, you will soon be able to understand a passage better and quicker using this approach than you did when you were trying to just read every word from beginning to end.
Step 1: Generate Reading Questions from the Title
There are common places where authors put their most important points. The first such place is the title. Though you will be tempted to jump straight into reading, never overlook the title. The title often is your treasure map. Find out what every word in the title means, and you have a decent shot at understanding what the author is trying to tell you. Authors put the most important elements of their communication in the title.
Example titles:
“The Declaration of Independence.” If I were generate reading questions from this familiar title, I might ask: Who is doing the declaring? Independence from what or whom? Why is the declaration being made?
“The Jazzman’s True Academy,” from the book The Birth of Bebop, by Scott DeVeaux. The obvious question to consider here is, what was the “true academy” that the author refers to? Why did the author include the word “true” in the title? Was there a false academy?
Step 2: Read the Section Headings and Draw a Line Through the Argument
Next, consider the section headings included throughout the article. Not all passages will have section headings, but when they do, they reveal two things. First, section headings tell you the structure of the passage. Second, section headings give you the signposts of the author’s argument. Let’s continue using the DeVeaux example for the rest of the steps.
Example: Here are all section headings and subheadings from “The Jazzman’s True Academy,” mentioned above:
[Intro]
Friendly Competition
Challenging the “No-Talent Guys”
Minton’s
Monroe’s Uptown House
What can we glean from these section headings? While they are somewhat vague, it seems that the chapter is organized around two parts. First, we can guess from the first two headings (“Friendly Competition,” and “Challenging the ‘No-Talent Guys’”) that the chapter discusses relationships between fellow jazz players, and that these relationships will likely feature a strong element of competition. Second, from the last two headings (“Minton’s,” and “Monroe’s Uptown House”), we can make a reasonable guess that the last part of the chapter will talk about important night clubs where this “true academy” existed.
With just the first two steps, we have generated key questions and intrigue around the reading. We have questions that we want to answer, and guesses about those answers that we want to corroborate. Note, for instance, that the section headings haven’t yet answered our question of what the “true academy” of the title refers to. Asking questions is how you turn the reading process into an active experience that can even be fun. The best part is that these two steps take less than five minutes, and you already have a decent understanding of the contours of the reading.
Step 3: Take the Fast Lane Through the Passage
In step three you will do a custom version of skimming that is aimed at answering the basic questions that you have set for yourself in steps one and two. To take the fast lane through an article, read the following sections, in order:
Intro paragraph
Conclusion paragraph
Topic sentences for the entire passage, from beginning to end
Let’s take these one at a time.
Read the Intro Paragraph
You may have heard the skimming advice of reading the introduction and conclusion of an article. And this is indeed good advice. Authors often spell out their arguments in the introduction section, and reiterate the main claim with additional nuance in the conclusion. These two sections give you a quick way to evaluate whether your guesses from the first two steps were on the right track. Here, for example, are the first three sentences of the opening paragraph of “The Jazzman’s True Academy.”
No aspect of the jazz world has been the object of more fascination than the jam session—or the locus of more misunderstanding. Its flexibility and lack of pretension, its offhand displays of virtuosity, its apparent disregard for everything outside of its own charmed circle—all seem to sum up that which is attractive and liberating in the jazz aesthetic. This peculiar constellation of qualities lies at the heart of the “modulation into a new key of musical sensibility” that bop came to represent.
In just these three sentences, our understanding of the article has taken a quantum leap. In the very first sentence, we solved the mystery of the true topic of this reading: the bebop jam session. It’s a good bet, in fact, that the jam session is the “true academy” of the title. And we were prepared to register the importance of these first few sentences, because of the few minutes we spent interrogating the title and headings of the chapter before we started reading.
This is a subtle point. Don’t miss it. If you skip steps one and two, and just start reading the chapter’s first paragraph, there’s a good chance that you will be reading passively. But generating reading questions that you then seek to answer puts your brain into a more engaged state, and your understanding will be supercharged.
Read the Concluding Paragraph
Once we have read the introduction, we should read the passage’s concluding paragraph (in this case, the last paragraph in the chapter), which I include here in full:
Nevertheless, Monroe’s Uptown House holds a place of special importance alongside Minton’s in the early history of bebop. By 1942 the Harlem music scene was changing rapidly. The onset of the war and the continuing economic decline of Harlem forced the bebop pioneers to look downtown, to the clubs on 52nd Street, for similar opportunities. In the process, the music also changed—becoming more codified, more commodified, more sharply focused. But the sense of community nurtured in the jam sessions of Harlem helped to sustain musicians in the difficult transition ahead.
This paragraph again gives us crucial information about the chapter. First, it corroborates that the article’s main topic is the jam session, and its place in the development of early bebop. We’ve also been given the important new information that the “competition” we identified in the headings actually led to a “sense of community” among Harlem jazz musicians. We also corroborated that Monroe’s and Minton’s were two music venues where these jam sessions were happening.
Before going on to the last part of this step, let’s pause and acknowledge how different this approach has been so far from the typical college student’s approach to reading. A well-meaning college student eager to accomplish “reading” might skip the title and subject headings of a reading, and go straight to the first paragraph unthinkingly. If your only goal is to “hear” all the words of a reading in your head, then this approach makes sense. But if your goal is to understand a reading, then taking just a few minutes to create reading questions and seek out their answers not only significantly increases your understanding, but also saves you time and confusion.
Read the Topic Sentences of the Entire Passage, From Beginning to End
Most skimming advice stops with reading the introduction and conclusion, but there is one other step to taking my version of the “fast lane” through the article. And this one is the real secret that often will allow you to quickly understand the nuances of the author’s argument in record time.
In this step, you read the topic sentences of each paragraph throughout the article. Often, the topic sentence will be the first sentence of a paragraph, but sometimes you will need to read to the second, and rarely the third, sentence of a paragraph to find the topic sentence. A good author will put key signposts in their topic sentences, giving you an almost magical shortcut to understanding the details of the argument they are making. This is because a good topic sentence is a declarative summary of the point of the entire paragraph. Let’s take a look at the first ten topic sentences of “The Jazzman’s True Academy,” starting at the first subheading after the introduction.
Heading: “Friendly Competition”
1. From the outset, jazz musicians have spent time playing for their own amusement.
2. In Harlem before the Swing Era, the most important jam session spot was the Rhythm Club (formerly the Band Box) on 132nd Street.
3. Like James Reese Europe’s Clef Club before it, or the union headquarters downtown (which black musicians considered “primarily for whites”), the Rhythm Club served as a clearinghouse for employment.
4. And of course, they made music at the Rhythm Club. As was typical for jam session clubs, there was a house band; but as Count Basie remembered, “the thing about the Rhythm Club was that somebody was always sitting in.” [This is an example of a topic sentence being the second, rather than the first sentence of a paragraph.]
5. The atmosphere was playful and festive, with musicians spilling out onto the sidewalk and shouting approval and encouragement.
6. At the highest echelon, the mechanisms for sorting out the pretenders from the elite were particularly well oiled.
7. For Hawkins, such apparently aggressive behavior could be justified as sheer self-defense.
8. The focus in jam sessions was on competition; its specialized vocabulary—cutting and carving—suggestive of hand to hand combat.
9. Jam sessions provided affirmation for those at the top of their game and a formidable barrier to those trying to reach the highest levels.
10. For younger musicians still learning their craft, the trial by fire of the jam session was as much a part of their training as practicing scales.
With these topic sentences, we are really starting to get a sense of the argument of this section, “Friendly Competition.” We learned that jam sessions were clearinghouses for employment (sentence 3), that they were boisterous affairs (sentence 5), and that they were pervasively competitive (sentences 6–10). Other intriguing questions have also emerged, that will be filled in when the full reading of the passage occurs later. I don’t know about you, but I want to know what these “well oiled” mechanisms for sorting out the elite from the pretenders were. That sounds like it is going to have some great stories.
Finally, it seems that sentence 10 offers a clue about why the author calls the jam session a “true” academy. The jam session was as much a part of a young jazz player’s education as the traditional approach: practicing their instrumental technique alone in a room. Players not only had to learn how to play their instrument. They had to learn the dynamics of playing with other musicians.
This last part of step three is the most time consuming, but the amount you learn from it will be well worth the ten or fifteen minutes spent. In a pinch, if you only have 20 minutes to complete a reading for a class this step is a life saver.
Conclusion: Read for Understanding
In this reading tip, I have proposed that you shift your understanding of what it means to “read” a passage for a college class. If you are like most college students, you have equated completing reading assignments with literally “reading” every word of the passage, in order, like you used to do in high school. But the amount of reading and the level of complexity in college reading assignments necessitates a new way of thinking. Your goal should be to understand the argument of an author, whether or not this is accomplished by reading every word of the passage.
How do we know when we have understood? When we can answer three questions:
What is the reading about?
What is the author’s main claim?
What are three or four pieces of evidence that support the author’s main claim?
While we are not quite there yet with our example reading, the three steps above have gotten us very far along the path to understanding. The three steps are:
Step 1: Generate reading questions from the title.
Step 2: Read the section headings and draw a line through the argument
Step 3: Take the fast lane through the passage
Once you have finished these three steps—which shouldn’t take more than 15–20 minutes, you will have a solid understanding of the passage and its structure. This will make it much easier and more efficient when, in a later step, you actually sit down and “read” through the passage more thoroughly.