Learning how to read

I recently stumbled on a course on Udemy on the subject of ‘how to read’. Actually it was notionally on how to speed-read, but in the end the majority of the course focused on the quality of reading rather than the speed.

I read quite a lot. I write a bit too. I’ve got a Masters degree. In other words, I wouldn’t have imagined a course on ‘how to read’ would be super useful at this point in my life.

I was wrong.

I’ll not go into detail on what was covered in the course but I would definitely recommend taking an hour and a half out of your life to go through it yourself. Here’s a link to the course on Udemy for those who are interested.

What I will just say though is that it’s kind of amazing to spend so much of your life doing something that you could definitely have been doing better all along. If you’re reading this then you probably spend quite a bit of your time reading in general. How certain are you that you’re really maximising your engagement with everything you read? How often do you read something and not feel like you really take it in? I’d just assumed that this was a natural part of reading. It hadn’t occured to me that it was related to some kind of deficiency in my reading technique.

Well, it turns out there are quite a few useful tips and techniques you can use to really get a lot more out of what you read. If, like me, you’re planning on reading a whole bunch more in your days and decades ahead, it’s probably worthwhile making sure that you’re getting the absolute most out of the experience, right?

I wonder what other things I do every day that I could significantly improve? Probably everything? Yikes.