(Photo courtesy of http://www.dreamstime.com)"It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never 'skip'. All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them. In this chapter I am going to talk about something which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem to others merely an unnecessary complication. If you are one of the second sort of readers, then I advise you not to bother about this chapter at all but to turn on to the next."
-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I'm not sure I agree with this. I like the principle, but I can't think of a situation where I would think it best to 'skip' - that is, where "I come to a chapter which I find is going to be of no use to me." How can you honestly know what the content of a chapter is unless you read it?
Of course, the title of the chapter may "give away" the content, or the author may say in the opening sentence, "In this chapter I am going to talk about..." But how do you know that the information contained in the chapter won't be helpful unless you read it?
Whenever I read anything, I mentally decide which material I am going to consider helpful and which I will read and dismiss or ignore (keepable and dismissable). And, of course, these will vary on the person - not everyone will place the same value on every piece of material they read! But I cannot dismiss or ignore material unless I read it first!
Even if I think I know what a chapter or a section is going to be "about", why would I skip it? Am I so certain it can contain no helpful information?
Others may be able to discern when it is best to skip and do it well, but I cannot. This is mainly because of my own lack of self-discipline. Sometimes I choose read books strictly for the learning, when it would be more "fun" to read a book that is written strictly for entertainment. Though I do enjoy the "learning" book, it takes more time and discipline to get through than the other sort of book. I don't skip because a) I don't want to miss a nugget of "keepable" material in the midst of a load of "dismissable" material, and b) if I do skip, it will be very hard to keep myself from skipping more and more, justifying as I go, but with the intent of getting to the "fun" book sooner.
-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I'm not sure I agree with this. I like the principle, but I can't think of a situation where I would think it best to 'skip' - that is, where "I come to a chapter which I find is going to be of no use to me." How can you honestly know what the content of a chapter is unless you read it?
Of course, the title of the chapter may "give away" the content, or the author may say in the opening sentence, "In this chapter I am going to talk about..." But how do you know that the information contained in the chapter won't be helpful unless you read it?
Whenever I read anything, I mentally decide which material I am going to consider helpful and which I will read and dismiss or ignore (keepable and dismissable). And, of course, these will vary on the person - not everyone will place the same value on every piece of material they read! But I cannot dismiss or ignore material unless I read it first!
Even if I think I know what a chapter or a section is going to be "about", why would I skip it? Am I so certain it can contain no helpful information?
Others may be able to discern when it is best to skip and do it well, but I cannot. This is mainly because of my own lack of self-discipline. Sometimes I choose read books strictly for the learning, when it would be more "fun" to read a book that is written strictly for entertainment. Though I do enjoy the "learning" book, it takes more time and discipline to get through than the other sort of book. I don't skip because a) I don't want to miss a nugget of "keepable" material in the midst of a load of "dismissable" material, and b) if I do skip, it will be very hard to keep myself from skipping more and more, justifying as I go, but with the intent of getting to the "fun" book sooner.
I do skip sometimes, but I never say I have "read" a book that I have "skimmed".
Do you skip? Why? And how do you decide when to skip? I am not a very good reader and would like to know the secret!
1 comment:
If you're looking for a specific piece of information in non-fiction (for research, say), you might skip to a chapter where it's more likely to be found, and then go back if it wasn't there.
If you're reading fiction, you might skip to the end to see if everyone dies and you'd really rather spend your time reading something more enjoyable, or whether it gets better and so it's worth going back and finishing it the whole way through. You might also skip to the good bits, Princess Bride style: the wonderful invention of paragraphs makes it quite easy to skim and skip pages of material that are obviously going to be quite boring (perhaps the 403 ingredients for Grandma's octogenarian fruit cake) to get to the good parts. This is even more true when you've already read the book—you already know the basics, so you can skip to the parts where the action happens.
On the other hand, I don't skip things that a lot of other people skip: copyright pages... title pages... dedications... acknowledgements... introductions... prefaces... I've heard some people even skip prologues and epilogues!
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