Life Kit - How To Focus While Reading

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

If you'd like to read more, but you're finding it difficult — maybe you can't focus, you feel slow or like you're not enjoying the books you tried — don't give up! These four reading strategies will help make reading a little easier and more fun.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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I just started to try out with Disney+, and would highly recommend Frozen 2. Thank you to everyone at NPR and Life Kit for the wonderful content during all of this. Stay safe and healthy. Bye. Hi there. This is Megan Cain, managing producer of LifeKit. And since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I've heard from so many of my most bookwormy friends, they're having a really hard time right now focusing on a book. Just when we most want to get lost into a book, we can't. Well, we have some tips in this episode which we originally made to help anyone who didn't really read that much become more of a regular reader. And we really hope it helps you right now. Okay, enough of me.

Here's the episode. Hi, I'm Julia Furlan, and this is NPR's Life Kit. Today we're talking about how to read when you're not really a reader. Because I think we take for granted just how complicated the process of reading can be. There is so much happening in your brain when you crack open a book. Having background knowledge. There's also perspective taking. Critical analysis. Inferential, deductive, inductive reasoning.

There's also creating imagery and insight and reflection. And this is happening in milliseconds as you're reading. See, reading is not that simple. Meanwhile, your brain is also managing all these other thoughts, like what recipe do I want to make for dinner? And when is Sally's birthday? And is democracy going to survive this period of the internet? Dr. Manju Banerjee is the vice president of educational research and innovation at Landmark College. Landmark College is a school for folks diagnosed with learning disabilities. And what Manju is saying here is that when we read, our brains are actually working really, really hard.

So today we're going to be looking at ways for you to read, even if it's a struggle for you. Manju has one thing that she wanted to clarify, and I think it's a great place to start. There is that pressure around you know if you're not a speed reader then you're slow and slow is associated with not being smart and I really really if there's one takeaway important takeaway that I want to say about this interview is people who have difficulty with reading are not dumb. They are bright, smart people, but they just read differently from others. So let's begin with that takeaway. If you're a slow reader or if you struggle to read, that does not mean that you're not smart. Reading slowly or having difficulty reading is the kind of thing that happens to a lot of

brilliant people like Steven Spielberg or Keira Knightley or even Whoopi Goldberg. And of course, there's a huge range of what it means to struggle to read. So please know that in this episode, we're being as broad as we can when we speak to all of you smart people who struggle to read. Folks with dyslexia, folks who just can't seem to pick up a book, and all of y'all who worry that social media just rotted your brain and now you can't read anymore. And I should say that if you think that you have an undiagnosed learning disability, definitely go and get that checked out. So we've established that reading is a really complex skill and asks a lot of your brain. But then there's this question of what to read. Fear not, my friends. I've got Juanita Giles here with the answers. Juanita writes this delightful column for NPR and is also the founder of the Virginia Children's

Book Festival. The festival brings book events to the small rural area of Farmwood, Virginia, and gives thousands of kids access to the magic of reading. Juanita is reading an 800-page biography of the Bronte sisters, but she wants you to know that she's just a regular, degular human just like you. People who do read a lot can have a little bit of snottiness about it. Everybody has a little bit of snottiness about what they read. Juanita's advice for folks who are struggling to pick up a book is that you don't have to read some massive doorstopper like she's reading. If you're wondering what to read, just read whatever the heck sounds interesting to you without judging it. It can be a thriller, it can be Clan of the Cave Bear, or it can be the Bronte book.

So like, my Dishy Celeb memoir is fine. It's a book, and I'm actually reading it, which is not exactly what happens when I try to read really heavy, difficult nonfiction. Dedicate that time, and you'll find, if you don't like it, the book that you pick out at first, put it down and just try another one. It's hard, but our next takeaway is just carve the time out of your day or night to stop scrolling Instagram or fretting about tomorrow to do what my elementary school teachers used to call DEAR time. DEAR stands for drop everything and read. It doesn't matter what, but just yourself, I'm going to do this for 30 minutes or whatever you've got time for on that particular day is a really decent place to start. You don't have to put a capital R on your chest to go around saying that you're a reader. It's just it's about it's about the reading.

It really doesn't matter what it is. I think Juanita has a point that being a reader can seem like this sort of aspirational label that we put on. I mean, I was looking at my bookshelves the other day and there are, I would say, a lot of big, juicy titles on there that I mostly picked up off of stoops at one point or another. But have I read them all? No, I have not. Do I feel like they say something about me? I absolutely do. That's right, people. You're listening to a hypocrite who collects buzzworthy books but doesn't necessarily read them. You're welcome. Our next takeaway for this episode is one that Juanita was really emphatic about.

If you want to read more, make sure that you have books all over your life. Put them all over the place. Make it available to yourself. You know, that's the other thing. Make books available to yourself and always have one with you. You know, I mean, I have an upstairs book and a downstairs book and a car book and a bathroom book and a bathtub book. You know, I have books everywhere. You know, make them available to you. And pretty soon you'll pick one up and you'll start reading. And then there you go. You're a reader. I think she's spot on. And the one thing that both Juanita and Manju stressed is that you don't necessarily need a paper book.

If your eyes are having trouble taking in books, try an audio book or even use a program for text to speech. I think sometimes it can be easy to get caught thinking that that two pound hardcover you've been dragging around is're reading burden to bear. But the truth is, if you scavenger hunt your books and bury them in all of the corners of your life, in your phone and on your e-reader and all over, you will be more likely to make time for those pages. What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025? We don't know, but we're making some fun,

bold predictions for the new year. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. What happens to democracy when one political party has near complete power? That's the question at the heart of Supermajority, the series The New Yorker just named one of the 10 best podcasts of 2024. Listen and hear what all the hype is about. It's season 19 of NPR's Embedded Podcast. Since the beginning of women's sports, there's been a struggle to define who qualifies

for the women's category. Tested from NPR's Embedded Podcast and CBC takes you inside that struggle. Listen to Tested, the series that was named one of the 10 best podcasts of 2024 by Apple, Vulture, and the New York Times. It's season 20 of NPR's Embedded Podcast. So now that there are books all over your house and all over your car and all over your bathroom or wherever, we're going to talk about how you can read them, regardless of why reading is difficult for you. We have some useful strategies from Dr. Manju Banerjee that are rooted in neuroscience that I think can help all of us. She recommended a four-step strategy that is our final takeaway. Step one is called preview reading or pre-reading. So preview reading is you basically look over how many pages, make a decision.

I have only 20 minutes. I'm going to do the first five pages and then make some decisions. So you take in the general amount of what you have to read and you assess how much time you have. The next step is called gist reading, which I'll give you the gist of. It's basically where you skim everything that you've got and you get a sense for it. I remember my mom taught me this smart trick about skimming when I was really intimidated

in elementary school, which is to look out for numbers and bolded words and any titles that sort of move your eyes over the page. Then you get to number three, which is strategic reading. And strategic reading is where now you're looking to gather that information to do really what we call content acquisition. And there you read slower and you can read as long as, continue to read the sentences as long as you don't get lost. Strategic reading is all about finding the meaning in what you just read. So try and see, can you make meaning by reading the sentence before

or the paragraph before and so on? And if you can't, then you identify it as something you need to come back to. You need additional information or you need to talk to someone, etc. That's the part of strategic reading. Then the final step, Manju says, is a little bit more for the classroom than it is necessarily for sitting down and reading your novel, but it's called review reading. And it's where you go over everything you just read to make sure that it's all there in your little brainy loo. So these four steps, pre-reading, just reading, strategic reading,

and review reading, are the way to get those words from the page to stick in your head. But Manju said that you can be flexible with these steps depending on what you've got on your plate. Maybe you don't have the time, so maybe you'll just do the preview reading and get straight down to the strategic part. It's a dynamic process and based on your objective for reading, you decide. Now, I want to take some of this excellent advice from Manju and do our own little recap of what we've talked about on today's show. Takeaway number one is reading asks a lot of your brain. If you struggle to read for any reason, it's not because you're not smart. Takeaway two is drop everything and read. Read whatever you want, but make time for it. Takeaway three is if you want to read more, make sure you have books all over your life.

Takeaway four is a little Russian nesting doll of advice. Evaluate how much time you have and how much you want to read. Then read for the gist of things, and then read slowly and absorb everything. And finally, do a little reviewing of what you learned. Kind of like what we're doing right now. And that's it, my friends. Don't forget that reading is supposed to be fun, okay? I know it could never be as fun as, say, listening to a great podcast hosted by your favorite person ever, but you know what? It's worth a try. I know what you want in your life.

It's more NPR Life Kit. So check out our other episodes. If you need some friends for your book club, we've got you. We have three whole episodes about making friends and keeping friends over time. Friends you can read with. You can find those

at npr.org slash life kit. And here, as always, is a completely random tip, this time from NPR's Sam Mertens. When doing electrical work, plug a loud radio into the circuit you're trying to turn off at the breaker box. This gives you confirmation that you've turned off the right one. This episode was produced by the incomparable Sylvie Douglas. Megan Cain is the managing producer. Claire Schneider holds everything together at LifeKit. I'm Julia Furlan. Thanks for listening.

If you're still listening, just wanted to let you know that if you've got a great tip about how you're coping with this pandemic, we want to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail with your name, your tip, and how we can reach you at 202-216-9823. We're going to share some of these tips in some upcoming episodes. Also, quick shout out for our Twitter, where you can find lots of tools for coping every day. It's at NPR Life Kit. Okay, thank you for listening. It's how companies like yours increase productivity while keeping data protected and private.

See why 70,000 teams trust Grammarly at grammarly.com slash enterprise. Do you make resolutions in January? We do. Specifically, we make pop culture resolutions. We also check in on what we resolved to do this last year. Did we catch up on all those classic movies or finally write that novel? Find out on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.