Quite a few people I know struggle to get into the habit of reading, let alone enjoy reading. In this post, I’m going to share some tips and ideas of how you can take more out of reading both in terms of comprehension and enjoyment of the process.
- Take notes. Whenever you read something, it’s worth making an effort to record the most important points. Some people like to underline or highlight ideas, but it tends to be a very ineffective practice. Instead, rephrase the ideas or copy quotes if they are so very well phrased, but don’t simply leave them on the page. Have a place where you collect these ideas or decide how you want to revisit them. If you have enough notes/quotes, you can try the constant comparative method to tease out even more ideas (tip 4 below).
- Organise your notes into subtopics. You can understand a topic much better if you have several ideas about it, or even if you have several perspectives on the same concept. Once you start to organise your notes into groups of ideas, you will realise that you have a wider and/or deeper understanding of it, with possible nuances, challenges and so on.
- Lateral reading. Read more on the same idea or concept to find out if it is the majority or minority opinion. Read more on the same idea or concept to deepen your understanding, to find out novel perspectives, controversial points, weaknesses, contradictions and so on. It’s super important to have layers and nuances about what you read because nothing is one-dimensional or easy. Lateral reading involves reading up on concepts that are related to the main idea or how certain ideas or methods are conceptualised in a related discipline. This way you can find some novel ways of doing an old thing or a new perspective and thus new understanding you never thought of.
- Constant comparative method. This method used in qualitative research is about reading and rereading your notes or quotes in order to organise them into topics. Reread your notes several times and you will notice that the ideas start “talking to you” and new ideas you didn’t see before will emerge. I suggest you put each idea or quote on a separate sheet of paper if you want to do this manually, then organising them into topics is easier. Give a heading to a subtopic if you find one and don’t hesitate to rename them, merge subtopics or create new ones on the way. Of course, this can be done electronically as well, where it’s a lot easier to manipulate the quotes, but maybe it’s more difficult to get an overall picture. You can find more on the constant comparative method in Maykut and Morehouse’s Beginning qualitative research (chapter 9).
- Book club. A lot of things are more fun when you do it with others, and reading is no exception. Get together your collaborative team or PLN and discuss your readings. You might find that an important idea eluded you or that a colleague understood a nuance about the topic that you interpreted differently. New ideas and perspectives thus deeper understanding are guaranteed!
🔧 Resources. Find my collected readings in this regularly updated Wakelet collection.
Do you have some other tried-and-tested ideas? Share them with us in the comments section.
