On Reading

Reading

I came across the term reading by chance while I was surfing the net for something on common sense.

People read for a variety of purposes. Many read for information.  Some read for memorization so that they can get better scores on the test.

John Lock: Of the Conduct of the Understanding.  Edited by F. W. Garforth       Classics in Education Series - No. 31

On Reading

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in. Those who have read of everything are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

There are indeed in some writers risible instances of deep thought, close and acute reasoning and ideas well pursued. The light these would give would be of great use, if their readers would observe and imitate them; all the rest at best are but particulars fit to be turned into knowledge; but that can be done only by our own meditation and examining the reach, force and coherence of what is said; and then, as far as we apprehend and see the connection of ideas, so far it is ours; without that it is but so much loose matter floating in our brain.

The memory may be stored, but the judgment is little better and the stock of knowledge not increased by being able to repeat what others have said or produce the arguments we have found in them. Such a knowledge as this is but knowledge by hearsay, and the ostentation of it is at best but talking by rote, and very often upon weak and wrong principles.

For all that is to be found in books is not built upon true foundations nor always rightly deduced from the principles it is pretended to be built on. Such an examen as is requisite to discover that, every reader's mind is not forward to make, especially in those who have given themselves up to a party and only hunt for what they can scrape together that may favor and support the tenets of it. Such men willfully exclude themselves from truth and from all true benefit to be received by reading.

Others of more indifference often want attention and industry. The mind is backward in itself to be at the pains to trace every argument to its original and to see upon what basis it stands and how firmly; but yet it is this that gives so much the advantage to one man more than another in reading.

The mind should by severe rules be tied down to this at first uneasy task; use and exercise will give it facility, so that those who are accustomed to it, readily, as it were with one cast of the eye, take a view of the argument and presently in most cases see where it bottoms. Those who have got this faculty, one may say, have got the true key of books and the clue to lead them through the maze of variety of opinions and authors to truth and certainty.

This young beginners should be entered in and showed the use of, that they might profit by their reading.

Those who are strangers to it still be apt to think it too great a clog in the way of men's studies, and they will suspect they shall make but small progress if, in the books they read, they must stand to examine and unravel every argument and follow it step by step up to its original.

I answer, this is a good objection and ought to weigh with those whose reading is designed for much talk and little knowledge, and I have nothing to say to it. But I am here enquiring into the conduct of the understanding in its progress towards knowledge; and to those who aim at that I may say that he who fair and softly goes steadily forward in a course that points right will sooner be at his journey's end than he that runs after everyone he meets, though he gallop all day full speed.

To which let me add that this way of thinking on and profiting by what we read will be a clog and rub to anyone only in the beginning; when custom and exercise has made it familiar, it will be dispatched in most occasions without resting or interruption in the course of our reading. The motions and views of a mind exercised that way are wonderfully quick; and a man used to such sort of reflections sees as much at one glimpse as would require a long discourse to lay before another and make out in an entire and gradual deduction.

Besides that, when the first difficulties are over, the delight and sensible advantage it brings mightily encourages and enlivens the mind in reading, which without this is very improperly called study.

Leon Festinger has made similar comment when he was working on his well-known book, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance:

“ It was easy enough to restate empirical findings in a more slightly more

general form, but this kind of intellectual exercise does not lead to much

 progress…more difficult were the problems of integrating the material and

 of getting some theoretical hunches that would begin to handle the data in a

 satisfactory way.”

On reading, Henry David Thoreau urged us to take reading seriously, not simply read easy everyday news; he regarded such pursuit as gossipping. For him, reading classics was a better choice, for they are recorded of mankind. He put it like this:

“ Reading as a noble intellectual exercise…it is something we have to stand

 on tip-top to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.” 

There is lots of information and data on the Internet in which people can access. The real question is, as Andrew Lian has asked: Does it worth anything?

Attention span

I have checked searched the WWW for this term. Many terms also have links to additional information on the University of Maryland Medicine website.

Attention Span:

If you are unable to complete a thought, or are easily distracted by other stimuli , you may have an abnormal attention span. This may have a number of causes, a few examples are:

• attention deficit disorder (ADD): People with attention deficit disorder (A.D.D.) are easily distracted, have difficulty paying attention, and may be unable to focus more than a few moments on mental tasks. They may be physically active and behave impulsively.  

• confusion

• negativism

• manic depressive illness

• histrionic personality disorder

• schizophrenia

 Halliday (1989) has written a brief history of the written language in one of his books: Spoken and Written Language. 

“ Writing evolves in response to needs that arise as a results of cultural changes. The particular circumstance that led to the development of writing was the complex of events whereby certain human groups changed over from a mobile way of life

http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/Publications/CESdigital/locke/conduct/title.html. (Accessed 27 August 2001)