Painless Reading Comprehension - Darolyn “Lyn” Jones Ed.D. 2016

How do i read for information versus reading for fun?
Different types of reading

Remember in Chapter Five when I asked if you had ever stayed up late reading a book because you just couldn’t put it down? For most of us, that’s what pleasure reading is like! Our brain is awake, and we are so into the story that we hang on to every word.

Reading for information

Truthfully, not many of us read textbooks for fun, but that’s because they aren’t designed for pleasure reading. Like encyclopedias, they are written to provide the reader with facts and information about a topic in, for example, history, science, or math. We couldn’t learn without textbooks; that’s why you have so many of them! We don’t expect you to jump for joy when you are assigned textbook reading. However, once you learn how to glean information from a textbook, hopefully that kind of reading won’t be so difficult in the future.

Reading textbooks requires a special skill set. If you want to learn and you want to do well, you must read. The purpose of this book is to help you help yourself, to help you see that textbooks don’t have to be hard to read and that you can even have fun reading them. I love the topic of memoir writing, and I read many textbooks that talk about how to compose memoirs. But, given a choice, I’d rather read a good story any day over a textbook. However, in order to be a good teacher and a good writer, I have to learn as much as I can about literacy.

And the truth is, reading for information is a skill you will need for the rest of your life! Adults need to read for information to survive. For example, adults must read their bills in order to pay them, they must read manuals so they know how to fix the kitchen faucet, they must read contracts to work at their job.

More adults read for information than for pleasure. You will have textbooks in junior high school, high school, college, technical school, and even the military. If you have an after-school job, you will have a job contract with rules and expectations and manuals on how to use equipment. You will have to read and know your driver’s education manual in order to drive. Once you are an adult, you will have to read rental agreements, house mortgages, car loans, and even your own kids’ textbooks!

I don’t mean to overwhelm you, but textbooks aren’t going away. As you can see, they might be called something else like a manual, a contract, or an agreement, but it’s all the same kind of reading, which is reading for information.

Textbooks don’t use characters, plot, or dialogue or any of the other elements of fiction to tell you the information. Textbooks just explain the information. Now, some textbooks may use more illustrations and provide more examples, making them easier to read, but they are still providing information. If you think about it, reading a textbook could be considered easier than reading a story because you don’t have to navigate through a “who is who and who did what to whom and where and why” story line. You use your reading brain differently when reading a textbook.

In order to read successfully, you must be “brainfully fit.” That’s like physically fit, but with your brain. You must ensure that your brain is warm and that you are actively reading. If you nap through your reading and hope that the information leaps magically into your brain by osmosis, you will learn nothing. Your brain will remain a couch potato.