Have you ever been assigned a book for class with the purpose of writing an essay about it? You go through the book, searching for quotes and arguments you can use, you write a nice little paper, and life goes on. But when you actually think about the book’s content, you find it hard to recall specific details, and though your essay explains what happened in the book, when questioned, it’s a bit hard to fully elaborate in your own words. You have “read” the book, but it was done for a specific purpose—not for you to fully wrestle with the words of the text and understand its meaning on a detailed level, but to use it as a resource for something external. As a result, the book has been read in a certain way, one which has left you with only a broad idea of what it was about. 

This example demonstrates a certain reading strategy which has unfortunate contemporary prominence: rather than drawing our understanding of a text out of a slow, elaborate process of wrestling with its passages, we scan the text—searching for accessible sections with concepts we want to find. Rather than reading through the particular examples and details which the author uses to build and defend an argument, we look for passages we can more easily grasp, and tune out the rest. The result is that the conclusions we draw from the book are no longer reached through following the author’s argument, just finding its thesis statement. The text was written to be a coherent narrative mapping of ideas the author wanted to explore in a specific way, but the process of scanning transforms it into a disconnected collection of fragmented concepts.

The best authors write with intense purpose, with every word choice having a specific reason, and the text as a whole being carefully constructed in a certain order and style to most accurately communicate a certain idea. But if we simply scan a text for wherever the conclusion is, we lose the particular logical reasoning which led the author to that conclusion, and therefore gain a surface-level understanding of it. For example, let us say you have no familiarity with the term “socialism,” and so you read some introductory essay on it. But because the essay is really dense and wordy, you begin to skim over lines which you don’t understand the meaning of, and search for that simple, easy sentence with a clear definition, something like: “socialism is an economic system where goods are produced and distributed for social need rather than market exchange.” And sure, this definition could be fine enough, but you would have a significantly better understanding of it if you reached the conclusion through using the full text as a resource to help you grasp it. 

Say that the author has spent the rest of the essay explaining the differences between planned and chaotic production, what actually defines an economic system, why this is the defining characteristic of socialism rather than merely one of its aspects, the difference between the use value and exchange value of a commodity, comparing it to other definitions and demonstrating its superior explanatory power, etc., but you’ve skimmed over all of these important sections which lay out the particular arguments explaining why this is what socialism is. When you attempt to discuss it, all you have to work with is the final definition, not its broader argument. It is a depthless understanding—a hollow definition—as the idea has been ripped from the context which grounds it, and it will be difficult to elaborate on it without more reading. Without the essay’s arguments as a basis for the definition, you are forced to construct an intuitive idea of it based almost entirely on that one sentence. Instead of reaching the general conclusion through the particular examples, you are attempting to do the opposite—beginning at a poorly grasped conclusion without a particular basis, and trying to build an understanding based on that.  

Rather than a coherent narrative map that we can use to help us grasp an idea, books become a collection of concepts for us to extract fragmented knowledge from. We can call this fragmented knowledge because it is inherently incomplete—it lacks the context of the text to ground it in its broader argument. With this style of reading, we gain understanding of a text not through its particular details, but its general, abstract ideas. Specific examples and statistics are no longer the basis of our understanding of the argument, just broader, more conclusive passages from the text. Further, these disconnected fragments go on to become the basis of our discussions, and so rather than being able to have a productive conversation about the specific arguments laid out in the book, our discourse becomes broad and vapid. 

One of the major causes of this kind of reading is a general lack of practice we have with wrestling with dense text. Late primary education doesn’t tend to focus on teaching people how to read critically; in high school and university when we get reading assignments we are generally just told to use them as a resource for a broader project. These assignments don’t usually challenge us to interrogate the content of the text or give us instructions on how to read it, but just to find the answer to a question in it, or use one idea from it as the basis for an essay or writing response. They do not require or incentivize a deep understanding of the reading, only ask us, “did you look at it?” Rather than interacting with the text, we scan it—searching for the point we need to find—and once it is found, we can discard the rest, and are basically finished. The rest of the words are irrelevant to our task, so we subconsciously block them out. The text no longer has any narrative coherence, it is now just a collection of ideas to be picked at.

One of the major reasons why scanning is so prominent is the simple fact that it’s extremely difficult to get through a dense book alone, and scanning for an accessible passage is much easier than working through all the ones that aren’t as intuitive. Reintroducing communal reading would be a great step forward in combatting the tendency, so rather than spending hours individually going through a hard text and having to guess at its meaning, you could instead find a friend to read together with and bounce ideas off of. But if you can’t find anyone to read with, and you really want to grasp a text, go through it slowly and methodically. Take the time to look up and define every individual word you aren’t familiar with, reread difficult sections multiple times rather than just moving on with a vague idea, and don’t assume that you have a full understanding of an idea until you can explain it in your own words. 

Books are a major intellectual basis for our general discourse, and the fact that shallow reading is so commonplace has a very negative effect on it. If the terms we use in our conversations are not grounded in adequate detail and particular fact, do we really know what they mean? And if everyone is only operating with a surface level understanding of concepts, how are we supposed to have productive discussions? If we want our general discourse and overall education to be more concrete and grounded, it is essential that we relearn to engage with books as coherent pieces to work through rather than reference points to draw quotes and conclusion statements from. It is only when we move beyond scanning texts and into deeper engagement that we can truly grasp the ideas we want to explore.