Slow reading
Reading is not always a performance question, but of space to stop and think. Take your time with reading.
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes two ways of thinking about the world. In doing so, he shows that neither fast thinking nor slow thinking are better or worse ways of thinking but lend themselves to something slightly different and both needing to be developed. The issue of reading could be viewed through a similar lens. There may be approaches that lead to fast reading but also approaches that engage with reading as a repetitive, relatively slow and lengthy process.
Here, we would like to introduce two procedures, SQ3R and PQRST. They are not the only ones that focus on sequential and careful reading, but they both show what to look for when reading, and how to actively proceed during the reading process so that it is not a passive, uncritical consumption of content on paper, but a genuinely active process of learning, acquiring information and assessing it rationally.
No one will always use all the steps suggested by the procedure when reading it, but trying them at least once is highly recommended. Each one is suited to something a little different - SQ3R lets you know if you need to read a given document and if it answers your needs and questions. The PQRST method is more learning-oriented and will be used when learning something from the literature.
Both methods are designed so that one should proceed from the first step. The steps must be taken in the correct order - in theory. But in the real world of slow, active reading, you can safely use whatever you need from both methods to improve your reading performance.
For beginners, we recommend you work actively with the text in writing and write out key points as you read. Experienced readers will then naturally find their approach and write down their needs. If you are reading the text on a digital device, it is efficient to use a tool that allows you to draw, write, insert notes or make other forms of annotation of the content in PDF files. Such devices include the desktop (which also works nicely on iOS), or perhaps Apple's iBook on an iOS tablet or for Android.
One of the ways to read texts efficiently - not quickly, but in such a way that you can find what you need, learn something from them, and possibly quickly recognize that a given document is not relevant for a particular need - is to use the SQ3R(survey, question, read, recite, review) method, which was first described in 1946 by Francis Pleasant Robinson.
It is based on reading professional texts, i.e. documents from which you want to learn something, in which you are looking for answers to your questions. So, it is unsuitable for working with novels or other artistic formats unless you want to do some hermeneutical or literary critical analysis of them.
The method consists of five steps:
A survey is the first thing a reader should do with an information source. Find out who created the document, why, its scope, style, and essential content. At this stage, you can go through the table of contents, abstract or conclusion, giving you a basic idea of the whole medium. If the document is irrelevant to you, you can put it aside.
Questioning is beneficial because it forces one to work actively with the topic. Active or effective reading does not consist of consuming the content but a specific dialogue between the reader and the text. The questions usually stem from your motivation for finding this particular document and can be added to as you read. Beginners, in particular, are advised to write the questions on paper.
The reading is only the third step, although it is often considered the most important and the first. Therefore, the questions should ensure that attention is focused on what is essential. It is a good idea to take notes, make extracts, highlight the text or introduce your markers when reading to enable you to find your way back to the reader. If you would prefer not to write in books, you can use PDF editors and write in a digital version, for example, on a tablet, which is, after all, efficient and helpful.
Recite is used to identify answers to questions. At this stage, you can also record facts, quotes, notes, and information that surprised and enriched you while reading. Keeping some openness to the text is a good idea, as valuable and necessary as the questions are. This stage is crucial to return to the document later or learn specific details.
Review is translated as a retrospective or overview, while Recite focuses on details, and Review gives an overall view. There are several ways to work with it. For example, we recommend giving a short lecture (five to ten minutes) on the article's topic, if only for yourself. This is where contextualization occurs. One's grasp of the information gathered and evaluating the source itself. Will you ever want to read anything else by this author or from this article? This, too, is answered in the last stage of working with the text.
PQRST is interesting compared to other reading methods because it includes a final point - checking what one takes away from the text. Thus, it does not just work with the text and literacy per se but is a method that helps with learning. This approach is needed to learn from primary sources or articles, not just textbooks.
As the name suggests, the method consists of five steps that build on each other. The first and last works with the whole text, while the three methods are suitable for application to shorter sections, such as individual chapters. The less experienced you are, the more carefully we recommend applying the whole procedure. The more experienced the reader, the more they will link the steps together, so typically, there will not be much difference between the ST phase and the PQ.
Preview is the first step in studying a document. This phase aims to get a global idea of what kind of resource you have, what it contains, its structure, content, etc. At this stage, it is a good idea to look at the abstract or introduction of the text, the chapter titles, and the language used. If the reader becomes familiar with the document in this way, they can gain insight into it, assess its usefulness, and be able to manipulate it better. For example, searching for a text on a topic is a crucial stage where you decide whether or not to study the material. One of the fundamental errors related to literacy is that students read everything they can find on a topic without considering the relevance of the sources and being able to work with them effectively.
The question is already related to the reading itself. The way it works is that the reader reads a chapter or other coherent part of the document and creates a list of questions that could be answered. This may involve converting a more extended section into smaller amounts formulated as answers to the chosen questions. The creation of questions is a kind of analysis of the text and leads to its understanding. An experienced reader usually does not formulate the questions explicitly but looks for important things directly in the text. On the contrary, he develops the question he needs to find the answer to as the first step in an information search.
The third phase is the reading phase, i.e. the continuous reading of the text to find the answers to the given questions. The reader is already familiar with the text, knows how to navigate it, and knows what they are looking for. You usually read systematically only those passages that are relevant to your interest. Whereas the first step was more about basic structure and form, it was about the content itself.
The summary is an activity that should give decisive answers to what the text has contributed. The reader should summarize the chapter's content in their own words, say what is necessary, and reiterate critical concepts. This is an essential step if reading is seen as a learning process. If, after the second chapter, you find that you are not getting anything out of the text, you can replace it with another one. The actual creation of the summary is also vital for learning purposes - it is a self-repetition of the essentials, identification of important concepts, etc. An experienced reader may think of this stage as making a statement, using the findings for a paper or article, or simply reflecting on what you have read.
The last step is to test the memorized information, as it is a good idea to determine whether the reader has understood the text as a whole. The test can be done in several ways. It is possible to create questions for the teacher, but in our opinion, it is much more interesting if the student is active at this stage. They can think of questions that would serve as an essential guide for the lecture on the topic of the read text and find questions that the document did not answer and that are essential in the context of the issue. Equally challenging is to tell yourself that you will create a battery of five or ten questions for the text, with options a, b, and c. Creating questions leads to a deeper understanding of the text and tests comprehension.