Reading Rehab

Words and the Word

Words matter. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2). It is through the Word of God that we learn about and communicate with God. It is therefore crucial that we are able to understand words in context, otherwise passages are misinterpreted and misapplied. As a general example, without an understanding of the New Testament, and specifically Jesus’ sacrifice, the Old Testament can be confusing. Conversely, without an understanding of the Old Testament, and specifically God’s Law, the meaning of the new Testament is incompletely grasped.

Reading Dysfunction

Everyone has had the experience of reading a sentence, paragraph, page, or perhaps even entire book, only to realise afterwards that they had not absorbed any of it. Their eyes had treated the page as an image, scanning the words mindlessly for nothing in particular. I propose that this symptom is the result of one of two maladies. The first is ‘reading fatigue’, suffered after reading excessively, in terms of either duration or ‘load’ (i.e. difficulty). The second is the exact opposite: a lack of reading, in terms of either duration or load, can induce ‘reading atrophy’.

In a way, I suffered from a curious combination of these two afflictions. At university, I ‘over-read’ as a way to cope with insecurity; unfortunately, this coincided with another coping mechanism, anorexia. When I became severely underweight as a consequence, my mental function was impaired. Upon recovery I was obligated to ‘re-learn’ basic processes such as reading; unfortunately, I was therefore in the undesirable position of being both fatigued and atrophied.

Symptoms and Prevention
Either condition can be very frustrating: even when consciously attempting to ingest the words, the reader may be unable to digest them. Such disruption of the eye-mind connection can occur on various levels. The most severe case would apply when an individual cannot distinguish letters, but sees only meaningless symbols; this would be the case when trying to read in a non-Latin alphabet. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a reader may comprehend whole paragraphs or even chapters, but fail to grasp the ‘key argument’ of the text. The most common case is in between, when a reader can decipher individual words or sentences but is unable to string them together into meaningful passages.

Needless to say, prevention consists of finding the happy medium: exercising your ‘reading muscles’ for sufficient periods of time and with sufficient loads to maintain or enhance them, without overdoing it and inducing counter-productive effects. In terms of treatment, the prescription for fatigue is likewise obvious – rest your reading muscles. As Solomon tells us in Ecclesiastes 12:12, "excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body." If you have been reading dense academic articles or 18^th century manuscripts, try a novel instead. Or, rather than reducing the intensity of your reading, stop reading altogether for a few days. You will probably find that when you pick up a book again, you can tackle it with renewed vigour.

Diagnosis
Atrophy is much more common than fatigue in the modern world, due to the saturation of screens: computers, phones, TVs, and other forms of entertainment tend to make us lazy and impatient in our approach to information. We thus consider text to be an unnecessary evil, placing undue demands on the audience: we not only have to repeatedly move our eyes from one size of the page to the other and even to turn over the page, but we have to conjure sounds, images, and ideas in our minds without the aid of graphics or audio. As a microcosm of atrophy, consider that schoolteachers often complain that students 'forget' basic academic skills over long summer vacations during which they are not sufficiently stimulated.

As a result, society displays a chronic neglect of linguistic comprehension. To keep apace with this systemic deterioration in readership, literature must become less and less demanding on the audience. It is for this reason that books like 'Harry Potter', although written at a child's level of comprehension, are so popular among adults (and is even studied at A-level as a 'contemporary text'). This creates a vicious cycle whereby readers choose texts that fail to challenge their comprehensive ability, which only exacerbates chronic and systemic weakness.

Unfortunately, atrophy is also much more complicated condition than fatigue. Somebody with fatigue may already have a healthy relationship with words, and ‘resting from reading’ is merely a healthy aspect of that relationship (note that this is not always the case: compulsive reading is obviously unhealthy). However, a sufferer of atrophy needs to establish, or re-establish, that relationship, which has been lost to under-use.

The first point to note is that reading impediment is essentially the result of fixating excessively on individual words or phrases to detriment of your understanding of the overall argument. Trying harder to read is therefore futile, because by doing so you will most likely intensify that fixation. In short, you will not be able to see the woods for the trees.

To rectify this obstruction, you have to realise that words are tools to convey a message, and it is the message that is important. They are, in other words, symbols employed by the author to transmit an idea to the audience. When you are reading, remember that the words in front of you do not exist as incidental, impersonal objects; rather, somebody wrote them for a specific reason. To see that reason, you have to use 'peripheral vision' in the same way as appreciating a cluster of stars requires you to look at it without looking at it.

The key, then, is to ‘see through the words’ to access the mind of the author. If the author is to convey her message through words, however, she must invoke some pre-existing idea or sensation, precisely because words are merely vessels or conduits of meaning rather than meaningful in themselves. This is, of course, a chicken and egg problem: to some extent you must share her idea so that you can understand her idea. This is perhaps one reason why knowledge is always incremental, or at least reflective: while most ‘new’ ideas build on existing ones, even ‘revolutionary’ ideas are typically reactions against something that is already conceived.

This problem of ‘meaning transference’ relates to the differentiation between tacit and technical knowledge. Technical knowledge refers to knowledge that can be codified in blueprints and understood universally and identically. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, requires some prior experience with the subject, because it is embedded in the task at hand. I was recently helping my dad with a presentation for his work; I knew what every word meant, but I had only a vague idea about what the presentation was actually about, because the knowledge it was evoking was tacit – shared only by those involved in that field. It is not just that they use ‘jargon’, i.e. words that only make sense to those in the field, but in a way the text itself is jargon, because it refers to tacit ideas that are shared only by a certain group of people.

Healthy digestion occurs when words enter the mind and are quickly translated into meaning; unhealthy digestion occurs when this translation is obstructed. That translation involves an indirect link (through words) between your mind and that of the author. However, without some kind of personal identification, that connection will be lost and words will appear as empty vessels. Hence, 'personalisation' is a crucial feature of re-establishing cogency: your mind must treat the words on the page as somebody's voice rather than as anonymous pictures.

A helpful comparison can be made to music.  Just like text, music attempts to invoke latent emotions, images, or ideas. Words are analogous to individual notes, the whole book representing the score. Words, like notes, do not express the intention of the author or musician in and of themselves – it is only in their orderly combination that this is achieved. Reading words rather than message is like when a child first plays a musical piece, eliciting each note one at a time with no structure or flow to connect them. Moreover, just as musical scores are played in certain keys that will determine which notes are and are not played, and thus the mood of the composition, so writing adheres to a certain register, be it academic, formal, informal, etc. This ‘key’ helps to convey the meaning of the piece by giving a ‘voice’ to the otherwise impersonal words. Other features such as pace and loudness in music, or paragraph structure and punctuation in writing, help to define the message.


Prescriptions
Below is a list of recommendations to address these malfunctions.

First, take notes. Even if you throw them away afterwards, the act of putting the author’s words into your own words allows you to focus on the meaning without fixating on the words.

Second, write down your own ideas. If you write about topics that inherently interest you, you may find that you enjoy words more; because you are thinking about what you want to say, rather than the words themselves (you have practiced the exercise of conveying meaning through words), you will build up the ability to absorb meaning; for both reasons, and because you are the creator of the words, they will be personal and familiar to you.

Third, learn another language. This will help you to reflect on the structure of your own language, and to identify its strengths, weaknesses, and in general, mechanisms, for expression. This forces you to grasp the actual meaning of words rather than just the words themselves, because you are required to transfer that meaning into an altogether different word, and have to figure out the meaning of unknown words through their context, i.e. the meaning of the whole sentence, paragraph, or text. Those idioms and expressions that are not translatable, or combinations of words that have to be reordered into a different syntax, will be especially advantageous, as the translation will be from words to meaning rather than from words to words.  In short, reading in another language is an indispensable exercise for restoring the uptake of the words that you intake. Note that this is the same process that babies go through when they first learn to speak and read.

Fourth, imagine somebody physically lecturing you on the topic that you are reading – preferably somebody that you respect or know well. This will give the words a 'voice' that can be 'heard', so that they will no longer be merely images to be viewed. Similarly, if you follow a blog rather than the news, you will associate the information with a real person rather than consider it as anonymous data.

Fifth, read a book of which you have already seen the movie. This allows for a kind of ‘reverse engineering’: because you already know the message, you can interpret words through the message rather than vice versa. The words will thus already occupy their properly subservient position in textual digestion. It also permits you to apply audio-visual stimuli to the text, which is a crucial facet of personalisation.

Sixth, don’t read the news, at least not only or always. The text is written as concisely and neutrally as possible: there is no personalisation (‘voice’), and it will exacerbate your atrophy because all the work is done for you.

It should be noted that there is a shortcut to restoring comprehension, namely lexiophilia. If you intrinsically enjoy reading, you will be perfectly situated to engage in the effortless, relaxed reading that is required and to avoid fixation on words. Hence, although not necessary, a love of language will assist you immensely in your recovery. To cultivate linguaphilia, try reading poetry, which is essentially a celebration of language that overlaps with its musical cousin. However, linguaphilia is a double-edged sword: if you end up loving words rather than language as a whole, your comprehension of compositions will be further impaired. It is therefore advised that you approach this method with caution and in moderation.

Finally, remember that fatigue is easier when your muscles are smaller, so in a fragile state you must be even more careful not to overdo it.

Conclusion

Words are mirrors of meaning. Reading can be impaired when we got lost in a 'hall of mirrors' that distorts the reflection of meaning in words. Reading rehab consists in focusing on the reflection rather than the mirror.