How to Read Well

Biba Kayewich

We read for many reasons, including entertainment, information, and understanding. Whether we’re being instructed, delighted, or both, the world opens to us through the doorway of a great book, poem, or essay. Reading reveals new vistas, new groves of truth, beauty, and goodness to be harvested.

The fruits of deep analytical reading are understanding and wisdom, which aren’t merely about accumulating more facts, but about making sense of them and connecting them with a cohesive and meaningful reflection of reality. Through deep reading, we seek wisdom: a knowledge of causes, not just the “what” or “how” of things, but the “why.” Becoming wise doesn’t just happen. It requires that we read well.

To read (and write) well is to think well. But just as thinking well can’t be taken for granted, neither can reading well. We often assume that once someone learns to decipher letters and words on a page and adds a sufficiently large pool of vocabulary, they know how to read. They can comprehend the meanings of sentences. But reading well means much more than this.

Active Reading

In their classic work “How to Read a Book,” Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren explain that all readers don’t read equally well. “One reader is better than another in proportion as he is capable of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort. He is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him.”

In other words, reading well requires effort; it is active. To get all that is to be had out of a great book or article or poem, we have to apply ourselves and exert effort.

Just because readers receive information, doesn’t mean they have no part to play in the relationship between writer and reader. Adler and van Doren explain, “The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court. On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball. Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it.”

What’s involved in “catching” the communication a writer offers in a text? A great many skills go into reading well, but here are a few key ones to consider.

Understand the Writer’s Purpose

This may sound obvious, yet many people neglect this first step of properly identifying the genre and purpose of a piece of writing, which are fundamental to its meaning. It’s easy to misconstrue meaning if the work isn’t placed in its proper context.

A joke is an obvious example of this. If a joke is misinterpreted as serious, great confusion can arise. We begin by understanding the type of book or article we’re reading: is it a work of science, op-ed, personal essay, political speech, satire, experimental novel, poem, or play? These different types of works can’t be read in the same way.

Identify the Problems the Writer Addresses

After determining the general genre and purpose of the work, we want to know what specific issues or problems the writer is trying to solve. That information usually appears in the introduction to a book-length work or the first few paragraphs of an article or essay. Here, gaining a basic view of the work’s structure is helpful. It acts like a map to help keep track of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Open Yourself up to the Text

This tip applies especially to imaginative works like fiction and poetry, in which the author aims to communicate an experience more than a definite set of facts. But it’s true, too, of nonfiction that we have to approach the text with a degree of open-mindedness, at least at first, if we’re to get much out of it. English teacher Jessica Meek writes, “Reading well means suspending bias long enough to fully comprehend the argument.” This doesn’t mean we can’t criticize or disagree with a book, but even that can only be fruitful if we’ve first truly understood it and done our best to see with the author’s eyes.

In “An Experiment in Criticism,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “We can find a book bad only by reading it as if it might, after all, be very good. We must empty our minds and lay ourselves open. There is no work in which holes can’t be picked; no work that can succeed without a preliminary act of goodwill on the part of the reader.”

Speaking specifically of literary or artistic works, Lewis emphasizes this need to open up, to “surrender” to the work, at least on one’s first reading: “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”

In Nonfiction, Find the Argument

Generally speaking, every work of nonfiction makes affirmations and denials about the way the world is. As readers, we want to zero in on those points because they form the core of the communication. They are the bones of the work on which everything depends. We should read important or puzzling sentences slowly and carefully.

Adler and van Doren advise, “From your point of view as a reader, the sentences important for you are those that require an effort of interpretation because, at first sight, they are not perfectly intelligible … They are the sentences that you read much more slowly and carefully than the rest … you are likely to have the greatest difficulty with the most important things the author has to say.” It’s a good idea to underline or star such sentences.

Ask Questions and Enter Into Conversation

As we begin to identify the author’s primary premises and conclusions, or, in fiction, the key characteristics of the world the author is painting, we should interrogate them. Do they ring true? What do they call forth or suggest? Do they square with our experience? Does the evidence make sense? How do they enter into conversation with other things we’ve read? What declarations of the author confuse, inspire, or excite us?

Adler and van Doren asserted, “The analytical reader must ask many, and organized, questions of what he is reading.” While the questions may be different when reading fiction versus nonfiction, we can enter more deeply into both types of writing by asking questions and relating them to other things we’ve experienced or read.

Write and Annotate as You Read

Our conversation with the text takes concrete form in writing—even if the writing is no more than a few scribbled words in the margin or the underlining of a crucial sentence. As Adler and van Doren wrote, “You have to see the main sentences as if they were raised from the page in high relief.” We make this happen by underlining or highlighting key passages.

Not only does underlining and annotating visually highlight key passages and make them easily accessible later, it also forces us to slow down, re-read, and contemplate gnarly, sublime, enigmatic, and otherwise crucial ideas. Oregon State University recommends that we take notes and respond to the text as we read, summarizing or explaining difficult concepts in our own words. If something specific interests or bores us, we should note that too and ask why. I feel handicapped if I try to read without a pen in hand. It’s become a necessary tool in my active reading process. Through asterisks, underlining, question marks, and notes in the margin, my pen gives expression to my inner dialogue with the text.

Like any skill, the ability to read well isn’t an innate trait. It requires practice, experimentation, and growth. Reading is a conversation and a relationship between the reader,  the writer, and the world. Through books, we can access the world’s greatest minds, and they have a lot to teach us. But we have to make the requisite effort to accept the gift that is offered, not letting it sift through our hands like sand. We should do more than  merely remember what was written. We must engage with why it was written and how it relates to reality. We must read well.