The Five-Step Reading Method

A brief summary of my reading method lately. It still needs constant iteration.

The basic goal of reading should be the unity of knowing and doing, so reading for entertainment is outside the scope of this piece. It applies to books, and also to reading medium-length and short articles.

Step One: Skim

This step exists specifically for impatient people like me. Get hold of a good book and you always want to tear through it. Though on reflection, what counts as having finished a book is itself a big question worth thinking about. So if you really can’t restrain yourself, cut yourself some slack: read it quickly once, and at least you’ll have a rough impression. The other case is that after a quick pass you find the book isn’t worth a careful read — that saves you time too. From this angle, speed-reading isn’t even necessary; a skim, a sense of the general shape, is enough — treat it as part of choosing the book.

Step Two: Enact-reading

I don’t know whether I coined this word. What I mean is reading in detail — in such detail that the author’s line of reasoning can be performed inside your head. If you can’t reach that level, there may be a few reasons:

1. Your comprehension isn’t up to it, your background knowledge is insufficient — this book has come to you too early;
2. You need to read it a few more times;
3. It’s a bad book.

Telling these three apart is genuinely difficult and takes accumulated experience; generally, the more you know about a field, the easier the distinction becomes.

The purpose of enact-reading is to truly digest the book’s content and understand the author’s thinking.

Note: during this process it’s best not to take notes, and certainly not to highlight anything. Don’t use busy hands to cover for a lazy mind, putting on a show of diligent reading to fool yourself.

Step Three: Extract

Close the book and start taking notes. Depending on how much information the book holds, whether you do this after one part or after the whole thing is up to you.

Taking notes with the book closed is a simple and effective self-check: it requires you to feed what you learned back onto paper. The notes can be a bare outline, as long as you can reconstruct the remembered and understood content from those points. If you have the time, the more detailed the better. If there’s really no time or no conditions, at minimum close the book and quiz yourself.

When the notes are done, open the book again and compare, to see whether there are errors or omissions.

Step Four: Network

To hold onto what you read firmly, the key is converting it into part of your own knowledge system, linking it into the neural network you already have. The basic methods are as follows.

1. Compare: compare it with knowledge you already have — where do they agree and differ, is this another face of something you knew, or an important supplement to it;
2. Reflect: is anything in the book inaccurate, or not detailed enough, or could it be put in a way that’s easier to understand.

Step Five: Practice

This is the last step, and the most important one, the one that cannot be skipped — especially for books that offer methodology. If one important practical technique in a book is understood and accepted by you, then the best thing is to go do it. That is the best destination for reading; a book with even one such point is worth a hundred times its price.

Of course, not every book has direct methodology you can practice. Then there are fallbacks:

1. Reading notes: ideally an improved version of the step-three notes, reorganized with your own understanding, or with your own understanding added, or using the ideas you learned to explain a new problem.
2. Conversation: introduce the content to someone who hasn’t read the book. Choose the appropriate approach and content for different listeners, but convey the same core idea.

At this point, you’ve roughly finished a book.

One last note: these five steps are not strictly separate or sequential. In practice you can trim and interleave them freely, but the last step cannot be skipped — otherwise it’s just entertainment reading, even if the book you’re reading is a very serious one.