The Vicissitudes of Fate
Dear Reader,
You might have heard that there are good readers and bad readers. This is indeed so. What you may not have heard, or even felt remotely implied, is that there are good reading days and bad reading days.
What I mean by this is that even the best readers have poor readings on occasion. And even weak readers can muster the keenest assessment of a text on a given day—in fact, sometimes the self-knowledge that one is a weaker reader begets unique insight into a text. Again, on occasion.
Weaker readers don’t typically have keen insight. (Though “weaker” has several different meanings…) Strong readers don’t typically misread an ordinary, everyday text. Yet the possibility of each is an empirically demonstrated reality that far too many pundits and educators (and, obviously, intellectuals) habitually overlook.
Good as Bad
I like sports, so I’ll use a few such examples. If you’ve ever seen Roger Federer play tennis, you’ll recognize that he possesses one of the smoothest, most controlled games in the history of the sport. If you’ve watched Federer play enough tennis, you’ve probably observed just a very few matches where his stroke looked a wee bit jerky and his shots out of his control. “Could not hit the broad side of a barn” the immediate phrase in mind. If you watch the NBA, you’ll observe that shooters have cold streaks and sometimes even the greatest players come up short. (See also: the early careers of both Jordan and LeBron, other factors notwithstanding.)
That is, even great athletes underperform sometimes. (Often, they gut it out until they improve mid-competition—why they are great—but not always!) Similarly, even great readers, let alone good ones, can find themselves completely wrecked by a particular text—or, even more common, by some random reading day.
Again, this reading struggle can appear in at least two ways: You either had no hope with that particular text that day or had no hope with just about any text that day.
Such reading struggles can be caused by at least six different factors (which I’ll address in the next newsletter):
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 [Hi there, 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
A Study in Futility
The sixth of that list is probably the main focus of today’s piece, though the others fit equally well. To give one example, I tried picking up Trudy Govier’s Victims and Victimhood over the summer. Govier’s an analytic philosopher by training, but she’s long focused her writing on topics related to argumentation theory and reconciliation studies. She has legit street cred in both areas.
It just so happens that I’ve read a significant amount of her writing—on both argumentation and reconciliation. And argumentation theory is one of my regular hobbies, probably past that point by now if we’re being honest. I was also briefly enrolled in a grad program in alternative dispute resolution (mediation and the like) and continued my reading in that domain even after dropping out of that program. Last, while I’m certainly not a philosopher and am not especially excited by the analytic tradition, I’m familiar enough to make headway in realms where I’ve done other reading.
I mention all of this to highlight a crucial point: every piece of evidence you’d normally expect for comprehension was there. Familiarity with author? Check. Genre? Check. Topic? Check. Check check check.
And I didn’t internalize a word of it.
I likely understood some of the sentences—maybe even most of them in the three chapters I read. Yet my read was essentially a waste. (Not, like, in a terrible sense, but certainly an ill-pleasing one.)
You might be thinking to yourself, “Ah hah! I’ve got it: you weren’t interested in the topic.” But I was. Very much so.
I wasn’t, however, in a place to grapple with it. Too many other concerns were taxing my mind. Even though I had the physical time for the reading—and the interest, and the background for it—I just couldn’t comprehend the words on the page.
Bad as Good
Lest it seem all doom and gloom, are there any remedies to the above scenarios? Yes, partial ones. I won’t write about them today, but I will say that I prudently did not seek to apply them in the aforementioned story. I’ll return to Govier’s book at another time, in another season when more pressing labors aren’t squeezing me.
But that story does allow me a transition from capable readers becoming weak momentarily to weak readers becoming strong (interestingly, they can sometimes remain in altered state. Indeed, if they couldn’t, my job would be boring.)
Part of the reason it allows me the transition is that from there I can note that whatever skill I possess in helping others read better comes far less from the academic research I’ve done and far more from my own myriad experiences with reading poorly. (Here I’m not talking about as evaluated by psychometricians—I’ve always thrived in their perverse little closed-world-assumption games.)
So… how does a weak reader become a strong reader, even if it’s just for a moment or a day? What does that look like?
As I already mentioned, I’m not getting into methods and techniques today. I will instead introduce two other ways in which weaker readers can become momentarily strong readers.
The first way can almost be split into two halves itself, but I trust this organizing difficulty won’t be too confusing. I say this in part because I’m going to return to my sports analogies. Basically, the two halves are about matchup and the given day.
In the NBA, some opponents are really bad matchups for each other. Team A can beat Team B, Team B can beat Team C, Team C can beat Team A. (Some Milwaukee Bucks fans viewed their team as the hardest matchup for the Lakers to beat in seven games; some Clippers fans thought the same of their team in this year’s playoffs; neither team beat the team(s) the Lakers actually ended up playing. I’ve made this a parenthetical because it is a hypothetical.) For a moment in the tennis world, it seemed that Nadal would beat Federer, Federer Djokovic, and Djokovic Nadal. Not so, obviously, but it seemed like it might go that way—a weird tennis variation of Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Reading can be like that. Sometimes, a weaker reader finds a book or sentence that just clicks. It’s a magical confluence of background knowledge, initiative, and straight-up chops. (If you’ve experienced this, you’ll recognize the strangeness of the experience.)
Returning to the NBA (and tennis) for half number two, there are also random days of insight and dexterity. In the NBA, this is when some bench-warmer gets hot in a game and just starts torching people. (Bill Simmons, back when he used to write and recycled far fewer tropes, would call these “irrational confidence guys” if they attempted that performance every game believing they’re always hot. They have a corollary in the reading world—people who’ve read well on a few occasions sometimes confuse themselves with strong readers, all because of a select few outlying events…) In tennis, if you’ve played, you’ll know that there are days when your power and control align into something that is otherworldly. You’re in your body but you feel like someone else is guiding your demi-god-like performance.
Once again, weak readers can have days like this, as even weak tennis players can. (A bonus is that reading isn’t typically a competition—it hurts getting beat by a weaker tennis player in god-mode if you’re the stronger one.) Weaker readers can just have on days. The various texts make sense; the insights come easily. (And sometimes, distinctively.) I’ve seen plenty of so-called weak readers find insights that a parade of strong readers passed by without note.
Another Way Bad Makes Good
The second way a weak reader can become a stronger reader is suggested in one of the many stray lines that won’t leave my own head:
As a near-sighted man learns by enforced observation to recognize persons at a distance when the face is not visible to the normal eye, so the man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen carefully and report accurately.
Henry Cuyler Bunner. “The Nice People.” 1890.
This short story isn’t my favorite short story, though it’s likeable enough. But as with many literary contributions, this one offers a sharper insight into human nature than most psychological and philosophical treatises. It’s why the impression of that line won’t leave my own mind.
In parallel form with that excerpt’s analogy, weak readers who recognize that they struggle learn to cope, learn to improve.
It’s counterintuitive, but that humble recognition plays a huge part in developing methods and work ethics that permit weak readers to comprehend texts that are purportedly “inaccessible” to such readers. Sometimes for a moment, sometimes for a lifetime. Since today’s piece is about the vicissitudes of reading, the moment is more directly to our theme, but I didn’t want to give the impression that such humble recognition is necessarily of momentary benefit alone.
So, what do you think? Have you ever experienced an “on” or “off” reading day? Ever notice someone making a deep insight you didn’t expect, or stumbling over something they’d normally comprehend in a flash?
I must admit that I don’t much care for the ups and downs of the reading life when I’m in a “down” mode, but I’d rather that I recognized that possibility than consider myself a keen reader in perpetuity. In my case, it often helps me determine what to read and when to read it.
To good days and fair navigation of the other sort,
Kreigh