How I Read
Mar. 30th, 2011 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laleiaSo I was reading this slightly older post someone put up about whether people skim as they read. The poster's friend skimmed, but she did not, and she was soliciting opinions as to whether other people skimmed through boring things (specifically boring sex and/or action sequences in fiction).
Interestingly enough, I felt like a lot of commenters were slightly judgmental about skimming -- the way they voiced their opinions, "I would never skim through something I like" (implied "because the author writes well enough and I am bothering to appreciate every word they wrote"), "I don't skip over boring parts, I stick it out" (implied "because I am not flighty and fickle like skimmers"), etc.
To me, the whole conversation ventured slightly on the absurd because ... well ... my default reading setting is skimming. Possibly a slightly different version of skimming than everyone else, but I ... thought that's how everyone did it?
I am a speed-reader. Friends who know me, especially those who know me when I did more book-reading and less fic-reading, know that I read super-fast. I can finish books in hours. And part of the reason is because I skim. I hardly ever go from word to word, absorb sentence to sentence. My eye ... it's like it chooses bits and pieces of paragraphs for me to process? And so I do bits of every paragraph and move on?
I don't even know how to describe it.
The only, ONLY time I go through and read every single word of something is when I'm rereading something for the umpteenth time, and I am doing the reread out loud. And let me tell you, the books I have bothered to do this I can can count on one hand. Maybe two. There are my classic favorites that I have reread a million times, and the word-for-word reread is reserved for the best among those.
I've noticed especially as I do more reading in foreign languages that skimming is the only one for me to get anything done. For example, when I read Chinese books, if I go through and read every word out loud, try to work out the meaning of every sentence, look up the words I do not know, I often get to the end of the paragraph and realize that while I know what everything I just read means, I have forgotten it all, or I have no idea of how it all fits together.
Instead, when I skim through the Chinese, there are scads of vocabulary that I don't know and sentences I skipped over, but I will have a stronger idea of what the storyline or the plotline is.
It's like with one, I see the trees. With the other, I see the forest.
Interestingly enough, I felt like a lot of commenters were slightly judgmental about skimming -- the way they voiced their opinions, "I would never skim through something I like" (implied "because the author writes well enough and I am bothering to appreciate every word they wrote"), "I don't skip over boring parts, I stick it out" (implied "because I am not flighty and fickle like skimmers"), etc.
To me, the whole conversation ventured slightly on the absurd because ... well ... my default reading setting is skimming. Possibly a slightly different version of skimming than everyone else, but I ... thought that's how everyone did it?
I am a speed-reader. Friends who know me, especially those who know me when I did more book-reading and less fic-reading, know that I read super-fast. I can finish books in hours. And part of the reason is because I skim. I hardly ever go from word to word, absorb sentence to sentence. My eye ... it's like it chooses bits and pieces of paragraphs for me to process? And so I do bits of every paragraph and move on?
I don't even know how to describe it.
The only, ONLY time I go through and read every single word of something is when I'm rereading something for the umpteenth time, and I am doing the reread out loud. And let me tell you, the books I have bothered to do this I can can count on one hand. Maybe two. There are my classic favorites that I have reread a million times, and the word-for-word reread is reserved for the best among those.
I've noticed especially as I do more reading in foreign languages that skimming is the only one for me to get anything done. For example, when I read Chinese books, if I go through and read every word out loud, try to work out the meaning of every sentence, look up the words I do not know, I often get to the end of the paragraph and realize that while I know what everything I just read means, I have forgotten it all, or I have no idea of how it all fits together.
Instead, when I skim through the Chinese, there are scads of vocabulary that I don't know and sentences I skipped over, but I will have a stronger idea of what the storyline or the plotline is.
It's like with one, I see the trees. With the other, I see the forest.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-29 05:21 pm (UTC)It's very difficult to explain when people go, "oh, there's no way you could have read all that already, you must be skimming," and yes, I was skimming, but that doesn't mean I was skipping important stuff. My brain just somehow looks at a paragraph and pulls out the important bits, I don't know how.
I've never met anyone who reads like me before! Yay!
no subject
Date: 2011-03-29 05:48 pm (UTC)1. Normal reading, where I'm gulping the information in great big snapshots of phrases, sometimes seeing the right half of a paragraph before the left half, and the actual comprehension gets settled in with easily a full page of lag.
2. Slow reading, where I haven't warmed up to my usual pace, or I'm rereading a particularly detailed sequence for precision imagining, or I'm proofreading one of my own works, or indulging in a favorite sequence.
3. "Real" skimming, where I glance at maybe two or four words per paragraph, which often happens when I'm not in the mood for a sex scene, or I don't care about the apparently-random new characters because they haven't gotten to their role in the plot yet, or there's some rather repetitive angsting going on.
I don't know any foreign languages, but I have the same problem with pure audio English that you do with not-skimming Chinese. By the time someone gets to the end of their sentence, if I haven't seen their mouth move or had a camera pan over something, I have a heck of a time parsing what was said. I don't think I've used the phone for anything more social than ordering a pizza since I was about ten.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-30 02:10 am (UTC)*ducks*
no subject
Date: 2011-03-30 09:42 pm (UTC)YES. OMG the same thing happened to me with a friend recently who suddely got all judgmental on me when she heard I usually skimmed unless something actively forced me not to (like, by being super good/requiring my attention to every word) and just do not get it. Seriously, there is a lot of text in the world, I have a limited amount of time. How does everyone not operate this way?
I've noticed especially as I do more reading in foreign languages that skimming is the only one for me to get anything done.
YES, AGAIN. I have always hated that school of thought that you should read books in foreign languages and look up every word if you want to learn. That is frustrating and useless. Skimming is the only way I do it too.