Sunday, July 28, 2013

Reading: Why is it so important?

Reading is an ability to decode the text; it also involves thinking skills like imagining,guessing, analysing, questioning, inferring and concluding. Reading is actually seeing the unseen, hearing the unsaid and experiencing something without undergoing the actual experience.
To read faster we need to read not word by word but phrase by phrase.  Phrases are a set of words having an idea or a food for thought. Words like "a, the, was" have no ideas in them. So we need to read them along with the keywords. For eg."The train is coming." Here "The train" and "is coming" should be read together, as a phrase, to make the mind imagine the situation described.
Similarly you can read in a non-linear fashion also if the text is difficult to follow in a linear way. For this we need to find the core idea first or the nucleus of the whole information.
Scanning and skimming are the two sub-skills of reading. Scanning means tracking down an information and skimming means to get to the main idea(s) and leave the unimportant ones.
So in short reading is all about exercising your conscious thinking skills. It involves mental labour. The visual media like TV, Internet utilities like Facebook, YouTube stimulate the sub-conscious mind which actually doesn't know how to think. It acts on instincts. So we should devote more time to textual reading than visual reading if we want to upgrade our thinking skills to higher levels.

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