How to Read a Book: Ch 4 The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading

 After Elementary Reading (what is the main idea of this sentence or so?) Adler moves to "Inspectional Reading." This is basically made of two parts. The first is "Systematic Skimming" which I think most people learned about under one acronym or another (SQ3R, PQRST, etc.) in middle school. Basically, look at headings, chapter titles, table of contents, and other text features. Adler recommends picking a few random pages and skimming them as well, which I think is a good addition. The idea is to figure out what the book is about and how interested you are in it. 

The second part, he calls "superficial reading", basically reading to the end with minimal stops as quickly as you can comprehend. If you're reading a challenging (but semi-comprehensible) book and stop every time you struggle you: A. won't finishing and B. will lose the forest for the trees (as the saying goes). 

This is good advice for a lot of things in life. The first time you try to learn something, I think it's often best to just push through and play that crappy game of Chess, make that ugly pot, etc. than worry about having a great first one.

The last chunk of the chapter is about speed reading. He gives a very general introduction to a few speed reading techniques (avoid subvocalizing, use your finger as a pacer), but the bulk is about how a good reader should master reading at different speeds and learning how to find the right speed for a piece. Most people could probably benefit from learning how to read faster, but some texts need to be read slowly. (The ol' Francis Bacon: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested") The most interesting thing he points out, in my opinion, is that your speed should actually vary across parts of the same piece. One paragraph might be dense and valuable, so you read slowly, but the next might be mostly puffery (he uses The Declaration of Independence as an example) that you can read quickly. Obviously most people do this while reading, but I don't think I've ever thought about it specifically before.

Finally, I learned the name for pseudo-royal we that authors use sometimes. It's, easily enough, called "The Author's We' or "pluralism modesties". I try to avoid it on the blog, it's not a construction I love. Why should I speak for you? But Adler uses it sometimes and I wanted to know what it was called.