What is your reading style? 📚
Studies demonstrate people often scan and skim online content and comprehension is often low. Its important to actually digest and integrate what we are reading for the sake of critical thinking.
The 4 Types of Reading
In the educational classic, How to read a book, Mortimer & Adler define four types of reading critical to comprehension.
1. Elementary Reading 🚸
Pretty self-explanatory. If you're reading this, you've got this level down.
2. Inspectional Reading 🔎
Quickly skimming and scanning to get the basic gist of the writing. Quite common for most online reading. It doesn't necessarily lend to comprehension or understanding.
3. Analytical reading 🧐
This is when you start putting your mind to work. A thorough and complete form of reading for the sake of understanding. Chewing and digesting the content.
4. Synoptical Reading 🤓
Reading and comparing multiple works on a given topic in order to reconstruct and order the conversation on that subject. Develops deep fluency.
🏁 Conclusion 🏁
Scanning and skimming often lead to low comprehension and confirmation bias.
Synoptical reading is essential to develop critical analysis.
References
(1972). How to read a book: by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren. Rev. and updated ed.. .
(2020). The impact of skim reading and navigation when reading hyperlinks on the web.. PloS one, 15(9), e0239134. .
(2020). Assessing children's reading comprehension on paper and screen: A mode-effect study. Computers & Education Volume 151.
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