An approach to reading that really works, part 2

This is part 2 of a post about Eugene Schwartz' book, How to Double Your Child's Grades in School.

The first part of Schwartz's reading technique teaches you to power through a reading assignment, looking for clues to help you construct an outline of what you will learn from that assignment, in question form. The outline-in-question-form part of his technique is crucial, I think; it makes reading an active sport. You end up tearing through the reading assignment looking for answers to your question, rather than passively reading the book, one sentence after the other. I think the latter approach is absolutely the right one for reading fiction for pleasure -- but not nonfiction. Not homework assignments, technical papers, newspaper articles, or textbooks. Or math books, for that matter.

The second part of Schwartz's method teaches you how to fill in the outline you've created, and how to remember it.

Interestingly, the first thing Schwartz recommends is that you ruthlessly expunge your kid's bad reading habits. Reading with a finger under the words, reading with your lips moving, reading with your head moving -- all are just habits to be broken. The only thing that should be moving is the child's eyes.

And then he suggests that your child start training now to make every reading assignment a search for main ideas, through a "forest of less important details". In short, he recommends teaching skimming-with-a-purpose.

How to power-read

• Read over the chapter to search for the answers to your main-thought questions.
• When you find the answers, highlight or underline them.

This deliberate physical act -- this aggressive underlining or highlighting of the answers in the book as they are read -- is the Golden Rule that makes your child's concentration automatic.

It's interesting to me that Schwartz points out the physical act of highlighting or underlining as being important. I actually take in a lot more in the process of reading when I'm underlining, making notes in the margin -- even if they are as simple as my saying 'yeah' or 'no way'. Of course, this is a problem with textbooks -- I personally prefer highlighter, but you're not supposed to highlight in the school district's textbooks. I wish they'd invent an erasable highlighter; how hard can it be? In the meantime there is always pencil. Or Schwartz recommends that you copy the chapter.

The next step is for the child to 'make the chapter his own', by rewriting it in condensed form, in his own language.

How to take notes

Your child should take a blank sheet of paper -- not in his notebook-to-keep -- and from memory write down each of the main thoughts of the chapter. Your child will forget some, and will get others wrong, and won't clearly understand a lot of the rest of it; that doesn't matter. What matters is that he or she will have taken the first self-test on the material.

He should then go back to the text and correct the outline, adding omissions and corrections right onto his scratch outline, and boiling down the material where appropriate.

He should then put the outline away, go to his permanent notebook, and write an outline again -- again from memory. He is freeing himself, step by step, from the crutch of the textbook.

If there are one or two errors or omissions, he should write them in to the notebook outline. If there are more than that, he should go to a new page in the notebook, and do it again.

When he has the outline of the chapter's reading completed to his satisfaction, he is done for the night. He has the material down cold, and has his notes ready in his notebook if a refresher is needed.

There is a lot in his book, obviously, that I haven't transcribed; tips for improving your child's outlines, for power-reading certain types of text, and for helping your kid hold himself to higher standards by doing a 5-minute "achievement check" when the reading assignment is over.

But all of this is beside the main point, which is to aggressively seek out the main points of a reading assignment, and to play a few tricks on yourself (let's admit it, most of us need to start doing this stuff ourselves before teaching it to our kids) to get yourself reading more aggressively and wasting less time in the act of reading.

I like the notion of actively tearing through the text with a list of specific questions at hand, looking for answers. And the need to underline the answers -- and to form an outline of the answers to your main-thought questions -- fits well with my perception that in order to retain anything I read, I have to somehow write it out; I have to actively get it into my hand through writing. (I've talked about this before with respect to math -- 'practicing to automaticity' means getting the math into your hand, the way that the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle gets into your body).

All of this is an elaborate recommendation that you buy the book. It's terrific. And while it blithely ignores the truth about most of us -- that we may not have the frontal lobe development to learn and apply these reading techniques until we're in our forties -- any one of these tricks that we can successfully teach our kids will benefit them.

Perhaps even just the realization that reading fiction and nonfiction are different will benefit them.

An Approach to reading that really works, part 1



Catherine here — I ran across a product called Highlighting Tape just the other day, on an assistive technology site.

Highlighter tape can be used for temporary marking of books, calendars, word lists, maps, etc. It comes off easily without damaging the paper and can be stored on a sheet of plastic for repeated use. It includes a plastic dispenser and is available an assortment of colours – yellow, green, orange, pink, blue, or purple.

-- CarolynJohnston - 18 Feb 2006

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Carolyn, in law school we learned something called book briefing, where you would highlight different parts of a legal opinion with different colors. So the legal question to be resolved would be yellow, the holding would be green, important facts of the case would be blue (I don't remember the actual colors of course). It's really efficient and useful. Some people were so lazy they bought used books that someone else had already done book briefing in (I don't know anybody like that, of course, heh heh).

We also learned a really great way of taking notes that I'll tell you about sometime.

Yeah, it's unfortunate the kids can't highlight their books. Maybe those colored sticky post-it flags? They are fairly see-through.

-- EmmaAnne - 21 Feb 2006

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book briefing

That is really interesting.

For a number of years I did something like that, but it wasn't systematic.

I would just change colors in order to highlight something MORE.

I still do that, with computer notes.

I should try a book briefing color scheme.

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Feb 2006

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Some people were so lazy they bought used books that someone else had already done book briefing in

I love it!

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Feb 2006

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I found highlighting tape the other day!

You can take it off the book when you're done!

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Feb 2006

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That looks really cool (highlighting tape) -- but I'm afraid it may be beyond my abilities in the small motor domain.

-- CarolynJohnston - 22 Feb 2006

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I'm holding out for erasable highlighter. But I'd like to try just one before I order a bunch -- and I've never seen it in the stores, just on the internet.

-- CarolynJohnston - 22 Feb 2006

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Title:	An approach to reading that really works, part 2
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	AboutBooks
LogDate:	200602172325