How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [10]
The Levels of Reading 1 7
the second, the second in the third, the third in the fourth. In fact, the fourth and highest level of reading includes all the others. It simply goes beyond them.
The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading.
Other names might be rudimentary reading, basic reading or initial reading; any one of these terms serves to suggest that as one masters this level one passes from nonliteracy to at least beginning literacy. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills. We prefer the name elementary reading, however, because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school.
The child's first encounter with reading is at this level.
His problem then (and ours when we began to read) is to recognize the individual words on the page. The child sees a collection of black marks on a white ground (or perhaps white marks on a black ground, if he is reading from a blackboard); what the marks say is, "The cat sat on the hat." The first grader is not really concerned at this point with whether cats do sit on hats, or with what this implies about cats, hats, and the world. He is merely concerned with language as it is employed by the writer.
At this level of reading, the question asked of the reader is
"What does the sentence say?'' That could be conceived as a complex and difficult question, of course. We mean it here, however, in its simplest sense.
The attainment of the skills of elementary reading occurred some time ago for almost all who read this book.
Nevertheless, we continue to experience the problems of this level of reading, no matter how capable we may be as readers.
This happens, for example, whenever we come upon something we want to read that is written in a foreign language that we do not know very well. Then our first effort must be to identify the actual words. Only after recognizing them individually can we begin to try to understand them, to struggle with perceiving what they mean.
1 8 HOW TO READ A BOOK
Even when they are reading material written in their own language,. many readers continue to have various kinds of difficulties at this level of reading. Most of these difficulties are mechanical, and some of them can be traced back to early instruction in reading. Overcoming these difficulties usually allows us to read faster; hence, most speed reading courses concentrate on this level. We will have more to say about elementary reading in the next chapter; and in Chapter 4, we will discuss speed reading.
The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading. It is characterized by its special emphasis on time.
When reading at this level, the student is allowed a set time to complete an assigned amount of reading. He might be allowed fifteen minutes to read this book, for instance-or even a book twice as long.
Hence, another way to describe this level of reading is to say that its aim is to get the most out of a book within a given time-usually a relatively short time, and always (by definition) too short a time to get out of the book everything that can be gotten.
Still another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterized by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.
When reading at this level, your aim is to examine the surface of the book, to learn everything that the surface alone can teach you. That is often a good deal.
Whereas the question that is asked at the first level is
"What does the sentence say?" the question typically asked at this level is "What is the book about?" That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are "What is the structure of the book?'' or "What are its parts?''
Upon completing an inspectional