Reading Is a Useless Word: The Many Kinds of Reading

Reading is a not a useful word because reading is not a single activity. Rather, it is a whole cluster of activities, each with its own purpose, own strategies, and own methods.

We don't want to fool ourselves into thinking that, because Harry Potter and Das Kapital are printed on paper, they should also be read the same way.

As a simple example, new readers of non-fiction will try to read such texts like they are fantasy novels (from this thread):

"I have this problem too, and I think it's a result of slipping into fiction-reading mode instead of study mode. The two bear no relationship to each other at all, and I suspect that part of your problem is that you're thinking of them as similar tasks; really they're almost opposites. In fiction you can skim the boring bits; your eyes will flick ahead to the next block of dialogue without you even being aware of it. For technical documents this is worse than useless."

In a lot of ways, these two types of reading are opposites. For fiction, the goal is to turn off your critical brain and lose yourself in a text. For non-fiction, you want to be engaged, critical and as active as possible.

When we read fiction, it's perfectly acceptable to "fill in the blanks" with bits and pieces of our experience. Not so for reading non-fiction—we don't want to misunderstand what the author is saying or protect our own world view onto his/her argument.

Reading as a cluster of activities

Since I made this discovery that reading was not a single thing, it has started to feel obvious. But it looks like our awareness of this is still pretty slim, even among professionals studying reading.

For example, here's an excerpt from a 2010 paper by Hillesund:

"In reading research there is a therefore a profusion of perspectives and a multitude of models (Kucer, 2005). But despite this diversity, most traditional research has tended to treat reading in a rather abstract way, as if all reading were more or less the same, as an individual, silent and inward act of interpretation."