Foundations · Foundation

Reading Well

Most people read one way, the way they learned to read stories, and then use it on everything. That works for a novel and fails on a textbook, a scientific paper, or a document written by someone who did not share a single assumption with you. This course teaches reading as several different skills, chosen to fit what is in front of you: how to tell in fifteen minutes whether a book deserves your week, how to hold an argument in your head long enough to judge it, how to read a paper without simply believing it, and how to read something old without quietly putting your own century into the author's mouth. It is honest about the evidence, including the parts that are inconvenient: speed reading has been tested and does not do what it claims, and some of the most confident advice about reading is not supported at all.

What you'll learn

• Choose how to read a given text from what it is and what you need from it, instead of reading everything at one speed
• Survey a book in under an hour and decide, on evidence from the book itself, whether to read the rest of it
• Diagnose why a particular text defeats you, tell a knowledge gap from a syntax problem, and build a route into it
• State a realistic reading rate for yourself, work out what a text will cost you in time, and say what speed-reading claims do and do not deliver
• Reconstruct an author's argument in the author's own terms, with an outline of the parts and the key words in the sense that author gives them
• Mark a text so that the marks still carry your judgements a month later, and say why highlighting does not
• Judge what you have understood on one of four grounds, and recognise when honesty requires agreeing in part
• Read a research paper in passes and say what its evidence can and cannot support, and read a primary document from its attribution outward
• Take one question through several texts, build the vocabulary in which they can be compared, and finish with the issues stated rather than a summary