Active Reading: Efficient Reading.

Essays on the Teaching of English
Raymond Stopper
Based on His Book, Teaching English, How To….

Active Reading: Efficient Reading.

Previewing is another way to read efficiently. You survey the chapter, sample passages from a novel and read the foreword, first and last paragraphs, the first sentence of each paragraph in most or all of the chapters in nonfiction or textbooks and the preview tells you what you need to know and you can find it without wasting time.

Why read efficiently?

As long ago as 1625, Francis Bacon realized that too many books existed for anyone to read all of them. In his famous essay, “On Studies,” he wrote “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.” Bacon was saying that some books should be read only in parts; that some can be read completely with little effort, as in reading for entertainment—romance fiction, Westerns and mysteries—and that some few need to be read carefully and thoroughly absorbed.

If people could not read all that was published in 1625 when relatively few books existed, the publishing explosion of newspapers, magazines, journals and books today makes reading everything completely impossible. According to Bookwire (www.bookwire.com), in the year 2000, a total of 122,108 books were published in the United States alone, including 3,378 in education, 14,908 in sociology and economics and 14,617 in the category of fiction.

The Web site, Editors and Publishers.com, says that 3,265 newspapers were published in the U.S. in 2002, and according to Magazine Publishers of America, 25,617 magazines were published in 2002, including 404 in education, 607 in travel, 615 in computers and automation, 718 magazines of regional interest, 698 in business and industry and 339 in the category of women’s magazines.

And how much time does the average American have to read? According to William Zinsser in his book On Writing Well, “The reader is a person with an attention span of about twenty seconds…assailed on every side by forces competing for his time…by television and radio and stereo, by his wife and children and pets, by his house and yard and all the gadgets that he has bought to keep them spruce, and by that most potent of competitors, sleep” (page 9).

Add gabbing on cell phones, surfing the ‘Net and playing computer games and this picture of modern readers is a far cry from the frontispiece that accompanied books published in the early twentieth century showing an aristocratic looking man seated in an easy chair, in a robe or smoking jacket, by the fireplace, spending his evenings reading a good book with his faithful dog Fido by his side.

Except when you are reading for leisure [some people still do that], reading becomes a search for ideas, ideas that you can quickly use and apply. That’s why you need to read efficiently and why you need to preview.