The Fallacy of Full Comprehension
“I know she’s reading a lot, but does she understand everything she’s reading?”
This question and framing, or some variation of it, is a fairly frequent one to encounter. And, while this entire series is devoted to reading comprehension, it’s not a question that quite aligns with the territory this newsletter investigates.
The simple reason is that it demands a sort of mediator and judge between reader and text. It adds the reading police to the reading equation. It disallows the experience of reader and reading, and demands some outside authority to interrogate the reading experience.
That question also leads to odd interpretations of reading comprehension. For example, if someone reads a lot of Helen MacInnes in their free time—like, obsessively—it still won’t be a surprise if that same person struggles to read Neil Postman’s Technopoly. Why? Those two authors write in entirely different genres. Skill in one genre doesn’t necessarily beget skill in another. Reading comprehension is not easily abstracted, regardless of what the dullard psychometricians postulate. But people who are obsessed with whether a person “gets” what she is reading would interpret the difficulty with understanding Postman as evidence that that person hadn’t really comprehended MacInnes’s tales, even though that inference is mostly baseless. That reader who doesn’t get Postman might quite readily comprehend Louise Penny, Nick Petrie, or Agatha Christie. Those three authors are much nearer in territory to MacInnes than Postman would be.
(As an aside, this same scenario is why people who are voracious readers in only one or two genres struggle with reading comprehension tests, which have a generic eclecticism to their selected texts. This doesn’t mean that single-genre readers are bad readers, but it does place them at a disadvantage with the more interdisciplinary nature of most reading comprehension tests. This is a point not well understood by policy makers and, frankly, many intellectuals.)
It doesn’t matter if individuals who read a lot on their own time are “comprehending everything.” It doesn’t matter if people who read a little on their own time are “comprehending everything.” It doesn’t even matter if one’s own students comprehend everything in everything assigned to them.
Here’s the thing: no one comprehends a text fully.
There are poor readings of a text; there are outstanding readings of a text. But to understand a text in full is beyond the capacity of even its author.
To understand the construction of every line, what makes them flow, to understand every reference, implicit and explicit, to understand every latent possibility a text contains—these are impossibilities on first, second, and fortieth reads.
A great text always has more potential. And most good ones do, too. A person can understand this while still advocating for good reading. But to demand that someone understands everything they read is absurd. No one can.
And with younger readers in particular, who cares if they understand everything they read? They are reading! Yes, it might be a problem later on if they’ve learned to read in only one way. If a person is that concerned for a young reader’s comprehension, that person can spend some time with the young reader, modeling different ways of reading a text.
The concern for a young reader’s comprehension might be well-intentioned, but we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.
Rather than asking whether someone has “fully comprehended” a text, seek instead to see what they’ve comprehended. See what background they’ve gathered, what tidbits they’ve collected. Most reads don’t require the attendance of our every moment. It’s all right, for readers of any age, if one doesn’t necessarily read a text for full comprehension.
Certainly, for occasions of testing or critique, one’s read has to be as clean and “full” as one can make it, but that isn’t the same as complete comprehension. Avoiding inattention and over-anticipation and assumption in a read is, in fact, quite labor intensive. Not every read requires avoiding these three oversights or possessing the extensive background helpful for deeper comprehension.
Yet even if a person avoids all the bad reader habits and employs the assembly of readerly methods and background knowledge necessary to a deep read, complete comprehension of a text is impossible. Comprehension is a matter of degree (and maybe comparison), not a thing absolute in measure.
This is not the limit of reading, but rather the magic of reading, the possibility of reading. No matter how good the read and the reader, there’s always more to be found.
Kreigh
P.S. Yes, I do recall adults pestering me with this question when I was growing up. I didn’t think much of it then—in both senses of that phrasing—and I think much less of it now, in one sense of that phrasing. Instructing kids in reading is one matter; persistently judging their reading is not the same thing, especially when it’s by the artificial boundaries of “understanding everything.”
P.P.S. This will come as a surprise of no one, but I also find the fallacy of full comprehension to be a severe impediment to readers learning the benefit of partial comprehension. That is, readers think of reading as an all-or-nothing enterprise. Thus, people don’t attempt Shakespeare or Plato or Austen. But partial comprehension can be something worthy of a read, something of value. To teach readers otherwise, if one is a teacher or cultural critic, is a form of malpractice.
(The fallacy of full comprehension can also create an impediment to humility, because readers who understand a text well sometimes assume that they’ve found every possibility that text contains, which is quite a different matter.)