Reading is more than letting characters pass across your eyes. It’s more than words and symbols flowing in and out of your brain.  Reading is more than just entertainment or time-killing.  It’s one of the main ways we learn, consider and grow.  Reading isn’t the same thing as doing, but it’s an important and valuable first step most of the time.

Many of us would benefit from learning how to read more effectively.  With that aim in mind, here are three different articles on the topic that I’d like to recommend to you.

How To Read (Brian Clark of Copyblogger)

Brian refers to How To Read A Book, which describes four different kinds of reading:  from the simplest skims to in-depth analysis, questioning and synthesis of information from books.  Brian urges bloggers and writers of all stripes to become better readers so they can do a better job of information their audiences.

Here’s a valuable quote from Brian’s post:

It’s been said that anyone can read five books on a topic and be an expert. That may be true, but how you read those five books will make all the difference. If you read those five books analytically, you will become an expert on what five authors have said. If you read five books syntopically, you will develop your own unique perspective and expertise in the field.

I don’t quite agree that reading is enough to make you an expert.  As Andy Hunt (via Merlin Mann) et al. talk about when they mention the Dreyfuss model, expertise and mastery require you to do a lot more than just read.  Nonetheless, Brian’s article does outline a very good process for reading and learning.

Master the True Art of Reading: How to Read A Book (Marelisa Faberge)

Marelisa uses How To Read A Book as source material but she takes a different approach by diving more deeply into the mechanics of reading.  She goes into the topic into a bit of detail but she makes it easy to understand and follow her directions.  It’s really well done.

Here’s some important insights:

When you read something–such as a magazine, a newspaper, a blog post, and so on–which is completely intelligible to you, your store of information might increase, but your understanding doesn’t. Your understanding was equal to these texts before you read them. Otherwise, you would have felt the puzzlement and perplexity that comes with reading something that is out of your depth.

When you read something that at first you don’t completely understand, then what you’re reading is initially higher than you are. The text contains insights which you lack. If you manage to acquire greater understanding after having read some text, you’ve elevated yourself through the activity of reading.

Do YOU challenge yourself enough with your reading?

Quite honestly, I’m glad I found both articles because they reinforce each other, despite being written by different authors.  I’m guessing that Marelisa read both the book and Brian’s article, which led to her own creation.  I think there’s a valuable lesson there:  take someone else’s starting point and expand upon it.  Worth remembering.

And then I found this post a few days later:

How To Read A Non-Fiction Book (Michael Hyatt)

Michael does not expressly describe the four levels of reading from How To Read A Book, but he alludes to both skimming and more detailed reading.  He describes ten tips for reading non-fiction books:  here a couple of Michael’s highlights:

Don’t feel that you need to finish. Not to be cynical, but most books aren’t worth finishing. I read until I lose interest. Then I move onto the next book. This is the secret to reading more.

and

Use a set of note-taking symbols. I use the same set of symbols I use when taking notes:

• If an item is particularly important or insightful, I put a star next to it.
• If an item requires further research or resolution, I put a question mark next to it.
• If an item requires an action on my part or follow-up, I put a ballot box (open square) next to it. When the item is completed, I check it off.

Other thoughts:

One other interesting point about reading came from one of my favorite books, Advantage Play (which you really need to read).  The author describes magician Stewart James’s practice of reading magazines and newspapers (keep in mind that this reading mainly occurred prior to 1980).

James would use a sheet of paper as a bookmark as he read an article or a book.  He would make notes about important points on the bookmark, recording the location of the information (article, author, topic, page number, date, etc.).  Later on, he would use the bookmark’s information to update his own manual indexing system, which allowed him to track different pieces of information and bring them together again later when he needed them.

Can you imagine doing that manually in this day and age?  Today we’ll bookmark individual web pages and use some tags to find them again.  Or we might just be able to rely on Google to find it again without writing down a single ting.

These are all particularly refreshing thoughts about reading when it seems like we live in the era of the iPhone style scanning of content in milliseconds.

Do you have any tips about reading that have worked for you?

Note:  this post originally appeared at the now defunct Broadcasting Brain; I’ve updated and revised it.  Enjoy this while I’m travelling to SOBCon!