The Mark of the Bad Reader
Dear Reader,
As I mentioned in “The Vicissitudes of Fate,” there are at least six possible factors that can lead to bad reading. I’m still working through their precise parameters myself, so the emphasis of today may be on the “reconsidered.” And indeed, we may need to consider these factors again. Yet I thought the subject worth venturing into, not least because I’ve been dodging it and its near neighbors for months now.
A quick review of those six possible contributory factors:
1) Your anticipations and assumptions—at the outset especially, but really anywhere—misled you
2) You made a bunch of marks and mistook that for comprehension
3) You lacked background knowledge about the genre or about something as granular as the individual writer [Hello again, Hegel!]
4) A near opposite of (3): You approached the text with overconfidence and overfamiliarity
5) Another near opposite, but of (4): You were so humble in approach as to be useless
6) You were in the wrong mental state for processing that sort of material
I won’t address all of these six factors, but you might be asking yourself, “Why this theme? Why now?”
Among other reasons, because this theme is evergreen; it is endemic. A multitude of capable, strong readers—however they’ve come to consider themselves—rarely recognize that they can, on any given day, be weak readers.
(There’s some conversation that might be had about whether these readers are indeed strong readers, as the best strong readers I know recognize their human frailty quite readily. So perhaps we might consider the I-never-err camp of strong readers to be pseudo-strong readers. We might. But I don’t think this is quite so, and not just because they’d object. I rather think that in most such cases they genuinely are strong readers, that they’ve merely mistaken an inductive reality for a universal one, when the safer category would be to note that it’s a defeasible case that they are strong readers.)
The worst thing I see among the so-called strong readers—some of whom genuinely are and some of whom demonstrably are not—is the evidence they produce for why they’re strong readers:
”I graduated from a private school”
Nifty. And…?
(I’ve taught kids from Harvard-Westlake to Phillips Exeter. Y’all ain’t it. Try again. Another version of this is “I took all honors courses and APs!”)
”I’m a college graduate”
Yes… Oh, that’s it? A diploma in hand and now you’re a reading wunderkind, ready for all intellectual debates at their deepest levels?
”I’m a critical thinker”
Right. First, can you define that beyond the tautological “because I think critically”? Second, is this a perpetual state, one subject to no exceptions in any given subject, topic, or scenario?
”I have a graduate degree”
So, if you’re an MD, you can dexterously read everything from pharmaceutical studies to surgical techniques, with philosophy of science an added bonus?
Or if you’re someone with a PhD in intellectual history specializing in Augustine of Hippo, you’re equipped to understand mathematical approaches to human understanding from Francis Galton to contemporary psychometrics?
(Observe that each of the above scenarios involve territory at least plausibly near to that person’s discipline, though still at an extreme. Now imagine a scenario like the above where the connection isn’t even tenuous.)
“I research and teach reading comprehension”
Yup, that there’s a mirror. That I understand how to assist others in their reading comprehension as both researcher and practitioner doesn’t make me immune to pathetically bad reading. I am not the least of readers. And yet, I all too often am. (Pretty sure this newsletter has included a few of my self-own stories already.) Even if a person does recognize their human frailties, that doesn’t cause those frailties to magically disappear.
I’m sure you could fill in your own quotes to the above, hopefully not from your own life. Sometimes, such claims are helpful or necessary in conversation, but those instances are rarer than Very Serious Thinking People imagine.
Keen or astute readers rarely have to tell you that they are so skilled—they demonstrate it. Critical thinkers always tell you they are critical thinkers, but I don’t know whether they’ve elevated the discourse by invoking the term “critical thinking.” Their claim certainly won’t have demonstrated anything other than self-belief, one at best buttressed by the idea that a past credential begets eternal and unrivalled comprehension.
Now, the above listing of sample quotes I’ve encountered in various conversation—overheard, as a participant, from articles and books. It’s an ugly list, to be sure. But then, I did give fair warning with the title of today’s piece. Leaving the bad evidence for strong reading skills aside, let’s look with a little more depth at those six factors that can lead to bad reading.
Anticipations and Assumptions
An interesting habit that classroom (and sometimes college) teachers instill in their students is anticipation of what comes next in a story. “And what do you think might happen next?” they intone at the end of a chapter.
In fact, skilled employment of anticipation is often considered a sign of a promising reader. And those who cannot anticipate what comes next are observed with concern. Perhaps here is a reader in need of remediation.
What doesn’t get communicated, however, is that anticipating while reading is like making an estimate in mathematics: you think you’re coming close to the number, but you might be off.
Because some students wish to please their teachers, they really take to anticipating. The degree to which they do this leaves the analogy of an estimate. It rather becomes more akin to that hideous slang “the guestimate.” You know, where you aren’t even taking 399 times 401 and considering them to be roughly 400 times 400 (as would be a way of estimating that multiplication); instead, you’d look at 399 times 401 and quickly shout “40,000!” because guestimating.
And you’d be 119,999 off with your guestimate instead of only 1 off if you’d estimated. Whew.
Anticipation can be a useful tool in reading, but when your anticipation doesn’t match reality, you’ve got to re-adjust to the text in front of you, instead of continuing to follow your now-errant anticipation. Competent reading teachers do their best to instill this re-adjustment in students, yet even skilled readers can find it hard to leave their anticipations behind. (This is a good thing for impressions, especially in poetry, but it’s disastrous if one is reading for the logical flow of a text.)
Assumptions behave in like manner. Here the difficulty is more of expectation or prejudgment. While an anticipation can be “Oh, I see where this is going,” an assumption is “I think this is what this thing is.” So if you’re reading a social science paper, you might assume that there’ll be some graphs and the structure will be pretty pedestrian with lots of repeats and recapitulations and, aside from the technical jargon, fairly basic word choice.
And if you found yourself reading Daniel Sarewitz, you’d be royally screwed having entered with this assumption…
The Mismarking of Man
I’ll be brief here, as I do have individual pieces planned for both underlining and notetaking. If, however, you’ve made a bunch of marks and think that that means you’ve understood the passage, you have mistaken a possible sign of a thing for the thing itself. Put more bluntly, marks don’t create or even imply comprehension. Marks are simply marks. You can take that tautology back to your teachers.
Background Knowledge, Again
So this one I’ve already written about quite a bit, and I’ll write about it some more.
I’ll simply emphasize here that sometimes the background knowledge you need is about the single author you’re attempting. Without this, and sometimes this comes only when you’re in the middle of working through their argument, you won’t be able to make headway with certain authors. It’s strange to think of background knowledge becoming quite so granular—and it typically isn’t—but it is the case on rare occasion. Something to be mindful of in your reading.
Overconfidence and Overfamiliarity
This one sometimes doubles with the assumptions discussed above. And I’ve been trying to decide whether it truly is separable from the land of assumptions. As of this writing, I’m leaning towards it standing as a separate category.
This flaw happens most commonly when a person is reading within a discipline or specialty that is their own or near to it. There’s a basic sense of warranted “I’ve got this” that is accompanied by hubris. Whereas assumptions can happen with or without hubris, here the cause of errant assumptions is at its core hubristic. (This mentality is not what is suggested by “Congruous Incongruities,” I should note.)
Overfamiliarity can play into the old adage “familiarity breeds contempt,” but it can also lead to mere carelessness. (Admittedly, some interpret that adage to mean “thoughtlessness” instead of “look down upon.” I can’t say that this is the standard understanding of it, however.)
While anyone can have misplaced anticipations and assumptions, ones caused by the combination of overconfidence and overfamiliarity are distinct. This is the error of the intellectual, the expert, the well-read dilettante, the professor.
Out of all the ways listed here to be a bad reader, this one is perhaps the most painful, as it’s the least necessary. (Though mistaking marks for comprehension is close enough that I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise.)
The Pusillanimous Read
It is one thing to justly fear a text. It’s quite another thing to offer subservience or obeisance to one. I think I address this enough in “Congruous Incongruities” and won’t say more here. (If you happen to think otherwise, do email me and I’ll seek to remedy my oversight with further reflection.)
The Wrong Mental State
As I even offered a case study for this in “The Vicissitudes of Fate,” I won’t bore you with repetition!
Today’s piece was a bit more… evaluative, shall we say, than usual. For that reason, I’ve been avoiding it for months. Others I’ve found difficult to write because they are difficult to frame well or require some missing piece before I’ll find them satisfactory to publish. This one, though, wasn’t a hard one to put down in outline. It’s just that I don’t greatly enjoy being this pointed.
But rather than be a pusillanimous writer, I decided to write about the pusillanimous reader. I hope that however much of a downer today’s exploration was, that you found something worth considering.
To good reading,
Kreigh
P.S. If you happen to be one of my students, consider this blog post assigned reading. But if you aren’t, as most of this newsletter’s readers are not, how can you resist reading a piece with this lead: “how did the worst man in the world manage to write the best biography?” That post is a romp and a half.