Musings of an Educator, Writer, & Lifelong Learner

Literacy rates have never been higher, no matter which corner of the globe you should think to examine, yet it’s also true that among the literate many of us struggle to read.

But what is reading, actually? As there are different forms of writing, such as short-form vs long-form, informational vs literary, or fiction vs non-fiction, so are there, certainly, different forms of reading.

Much of our capacity to read is set by our preferences. Some of us may strongly prefer fiction to non-fiction, and then, even within fiction, there’s an array of genres to choose from. When someone of this stripe picks up a memoir, their eyes glaze over, nothing jumps out, and little is retained. And there’s no doubt that some writers don’t tend to their fields, turning out such deadening prose that the reader’s interest never really stands a chance of taking root, much less of growing.

Prior knowledge also determines what we’re able to read effectively, and that’s a matter of accumulation. Most of us would struggle to work through an article on neuroscience for its key takeaways because we haven’t spent the many long hours needed to familiarize ourselves with the various parts of the human brain and their intricate functions.

And now with the ascendancy of digital media, there’s a new and formidable threat to the skill of reading. The virtual world flashes at us innumerable distractions, and attention spans, especially of younger demographics, have telescoped direly, hamstringing our capacities to read in never-before-seen ways. Imagine being a member of Victorian society and waiting for the latest serialized chapter of Dickens to be published in the newspaper to which you’re subscribed, and reading that with gusto. That’s what entertainment was. Now we have Instagram reels and Youtube shorts. They had Bleak House; we have AI-generated cats with hyperbolically morose expressions, put through mawkishly tragic situations, meowing along to the tune of Billy Eilish’s Barbie soundtrack special “What Was I Made For?”. Should we be surprised that there are freshmen showing up on elite college campuses without the ability to sit through a literary novel?

We are made for things besides reading, that’s for sure, as evolutionary biologists have proven. Acquiring the skill to read considerably re-wires the human brain, converting neurons zoned for the ability of facial recognition. In our technologically advanced state of affairs, the daily blitz of digital media, with unhappy irony, sweeps us ever closer to the condition of our ancestors who never had the luck to exist coevally with the printing press.

Reading is more than word recognition and the capacity to translate script to sound. When we struggle to read complex texts, what we struggle with is understanding what has been read granularly. When a text seems opaque, the words don’t quite add up, the connections between sentences, paragraphs, and sections somehow elude us, and the meanings that emerge are scattered, fragmentary.

Reading is, instead, a richly layered form of behavior. If reading, in its thinnest description, comprises of knowing the meanings of individual words, sounding them out in our heads, and stringing them together, what can we say about the processes that make up the activity of reading with understanding?

Though I’m not an expert in literacy studies, I am able to make a few remarks as someone who’s able to sit through a (well-written) literary novel; and as a high school English Language Arts teacher who observes daily the many challenges that obviously literate and intelligent students encounter when asked to read complex texts with understanding, especially if it’s a text of some length.

There are 3 key processes of reading with understanding I would denominate. They are:

1. Recursion (Decoding)
2. Anatomization (Decoding)
3. Aggregation (Interpretation)

Though decoding and interpretation are closely related hermeneutic acts, the distinction, as I see it, between the two is that interpretation aims at subjective understanding, whereas decoding aims at general comprehension.

Recursion

As a linguistics term, “recursion” refers to how any one sentence is structurally able to incorporate other sentences into itself and still remain as one sentence. Put syntactically, independent clauses are able to take on dependent clauses.

What I mean by “recursion” in reference to the skill of reading with understanding is the process of how we read in loops. Our eyes go up and down, back and forth, all over the pages of the text we peruse. We make progress in our understanding of the text by going back at certain moments to the seminal details we picked up on earlier before returning to the present page. In developing our comprehension of the text, we are constantly trying to figure out how things add up, that is, how different units of linguistic meaning combine.

Anatomization

A number of textual metaphors are drawn from human anatomy: headings, footnotes, body paragraphs, spine, corpus, ink bleed, manuscript (“manus” is Latin for “hand”)–and it’s for the best that human beings don’t have subheads. The term “anatomy” itself is metaphorized to denote a genre type; an anatomy could be an encyclopaedic monogram on a single subject, like Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

A crucial aspect of how we read for understanding is anatomical in essence. We mentally classify a text’s various parts with reference to cultural codes we have already assimilated. Academic writing has its own code, or its own set of conventions, as does literary criticism. It helps when you’re reading an essay to know that you’re meant to be looking for a thesis, for topic sentences, for supporting evidence, for explanations of the evidence, and so forth; as it does when you’re reading a novel to pay particular attention to features like internal conflict, irony, an epiphanic moment, or even something as workaday as the setting. Without these moments of specialized, targeted attention, you can’t securely know what a text is about.

Even at the level of the (unfamiliar) word, anatomization is a sure aid to comprehension. With new vocabulary, a tried-and-true strategy is breaking the word down etymologically; and into a stem with affixes, should there be any.

Using these codes subconsciously or consciously, we anatomize a given text into key parts, with the understanding that each part performs a distinct function. And just as you wouldn’t look for hands where the feet of a person are meant to be, a seasoned reader has a good sense of where to look for the various key components of a text, saving their eyes and brain the hassle of disordered scanning. The climax of a novel is unlikely to be at the beginning and the exposition at the end. A thesis isn’t going to be buried in the middle of an essay or monogram, unless you’re looking at inexpert writing.

Understanding how the where determines the what not only improves accuracy in decoding, but makes reading comprehension a much less mentally taxing task.

Aggregation

As the seasoned reader continues to decode the text and build up their general comprehension, they begin to perceive all too clearly that the meanings of the text are incapable of being sealed off within the boundaries of its script or medium. The text is situated in the world, the reader’s world, and just as certainly does the reader inject their world into the text. The schemas, or mental models, derived from the text are built from schemas that the reader brought with them.

What’s more: the reader may well have a few pet ideas, obsessions, desires, theories, or inclinations that they wish to find endorsed or supported by the text they have before them. This semantic operation may be subtle; a confirmation bias doesn’t have to be consciously discernible to the reader themselves.

In the process of interpretation, text and reader commingle and merge. T.S. Eliot observes that there are as many Hamlets as there are motivated readers of the play; here is a character into whom everyone is able to read something of themselves. But we do this, as it were, with all texts, and most definitely with all texts that have crossed the threshold of a certain complexity. Without this process, it’d be quite impossible for us to say what the overall meaning of the text is; there’s never such a thing as a non-subjective summary. What you leave out is as telling as what you choose to put in; and then there’s how you put it, the matter of diction. Every summary forms the skeleton of an interpretation.

The Struggle

So where do people struggle when reading a complex text? Where are the big roadblocks to be found?

I would say the biggest roadblock lies within anatomization: that of being insufficiently versed in the codes that inform a text. Without this knowledge, you can’t parse a text accurately. You can imagine how much a surgeon would fumble in the operating theater if they couldn’t even name the different parts of the human anatomy. So too would a reader struggle with dissecting a text if they didn’t know the pertinent cultural codes, the relevant key terms. And that is even if they’ve read many texts of the same genre. No matter how much the above-mentioned self-taught surgeon practices on unfortunate patients, our plucky physician will likely never reach the level of proficiency befitting a surgeon who’s been taught at medical school by the (text)book. Having a logical compendium of well-defined terms at your disposal allows you to build deeper layers of knowledge, whether it’s reading a novel or performing surgery.

As an ELA instructor, I find it helpful to make these codes explicit where they come up; and, if you’re not in my line of work, you’d be surprised by how much implicit knowledge needs to be made explicit to a novice reader of Literature!

But what about the problem specific to our hyper-digital age, which this post opened with? The stark shrinking of attention spans, the rising population of fluent readers who can’t sit through a literary novel: Can anything be done to release us from our own perpetual distraction?

To answer this, we can return to the Victorian reader waiting with anticipation to read the latest chapter of Bleak House. What keeps her so engaged? She has so few options for entertainment, compared to us; I hear that reflexive cynical thought as clearly as you do. Yet, we should consider that answer inadequate. She’s actually in no short supply of diversions: a circus could be passing through her county as you read, and there’s always someone gossiping about someone else in high society. She really doesn’t have to sink her attention into such a long book as Bleak House if she doesn’t want to.

What keeps her going is that she relates to Esther Summerson, the narrator of Bleak House, in a mélange of direct and circuitous ways, and many of these resonances rather unsettle her, giving her pause for self-reflection. She also knows an acquaintance or two who, like the character Richard, have been strung along by the Court of Chancery, and, as the case about contradictory wills drags on, she can’t help but feel sorry for anyone who has ever been seduced by the promise of unearned riches…

In short, what our Victorian reader does, and what contemporary readers are not in the habit of doing, is that she thoroughly aggregates her own perceptions, judgments, and experiences in conjunction with the contents of the novel. Her interpretation of the novel is leavened with a heap of cathexis; psychic investment guides her searching eyes. Her form of reading is an active and creative act of meaning-making.

Who among us these days can say that they read with such ample freedom of subjectivity?

In this digital age, it’s not just our attention spans that have been hurt. A phantasmagoria of images, videos, ads, and headlines wash over us each day, these distractions that are insidiously nibble-sized. They cajolingly tell us, Don’t even focus on what we present; let us form the background of your attention. But if we’re so inured to dwelling in this background, don’t we lose the ability to direct the spotlight of sustained attention onto the things that truly matter? What if the plot of your life were to fade into the background of your attention? The struggle to read with understanding does not pertain to texts alone. It can pertain to our uniquely lived experiences, too.

The wonderful news is that you can turn things around right now. Cast aside your smartphone and, with it, the Instagram reel of a person you’ve never met, whose staged joie de vivre you nonetheless find voyeuristic to look at. Pick up that novel you’ve put off reading. Dive in.