Reading Failure Modes

So we've looked at establish a reading process, which is the 'base' that we'll build all of our incremental reading improvements on.

To understand what kind of improvements we want to make, it helps to understand how readers fail.

In this section, we look at some common failure modes that students & other readers run into that slow down learning or make the process less fun.

Mere-exposure effect

When we re-read something, our brains give us a flash of understanding:

"Seeing something we have seen before causes the same emotional reaction as if we had been able to retrieve the information from our memory. Rereading, therefore, makes us feel we have learned what we read: 'I know that already!' Our brains are terrible teachers in this regard."