Four different ways to read books
Pavan Yara
Tech Consultant | SI Partnerships | Cloud Architectures | Low Code/No Code | Platform Engineering | Startups & Innovation
The Curious Reader has a great outline of the 4 different reading levels and sub-types described from Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren's classic “How to Read a Book.”
The first level being Elementary Reading — where the main question of reading is “What does the sentence say?”
Level two is Inspectional — where you ask, “What is the book/article about?” This is how we read most news articles and blog posts.
Level three is Analytical — when you want to really understand the topic by asking questions and chewing and digesting it.
Fourth level of reading is Syntopic Reading —this is where you read multiple books on the same subject and compare and contrast the ideas.
Each reading level serves a different purpose, so it’s helpful to ask yourself before reading, “What do I want out of this book or article?”?
You will be surprised by how different your experience of a book is depending upon which level of reading you use.