So I was reading this thread about grammar, etc… and realized that what they’re talking about is a totally foreign land to my way of thinking.
When I read fiction or things like descriptive history books, I typically tend to have my… attention (consciousness?) at a level above the actual words on the page. While i’m reading them, they’re more or less painting a movie in that higher level of attention. So much so in many cases, that it’s like watching a little movie in my mind’s eye with the actual words sort of passing through underneath that level of attention.
In terms of the actual language on the page, this style of reading does not lend itself to overly Baroque descriptions of things, or halting, haphazard narrative styles. Similarly, less descriptive, more linear storytelling works very well, and probably the best is sort of a combination of the two. Things like Shakespeare where the language itself is front and center vs the story being told are usually kind of a grind, in that the movie never gets rolling, and it’s all a sort of mechanical read centered around parsing sentences to figure out what’s going on. But within most normal parameters, I can get the mental movie going, and the writing style isn’t that important.
I get the impression that for a lot of people, this is how they read everything. The words on the page are their primary focus, not the secondary one. Is every book a slog? Is that why the writing style of particular writers so paramount to many people?
I’m kinda with you. My eyes bring in chunks of words at a time, but at the same time my mind is forming a mental picture (or movie of sorts) of what the words mean.
Even when reading technical information (like 1,000+ page specifications for how a chip works) my mind tries to put together a picture of how the chip works and even then I’m not slogging through the text.
It depends on the writing (and maybe also on what I happen to be paying attention to at the time). If the words on the page are skillfully deployed, and you’re prepared to appreciate them, this makes the writing richer, not more of a slog. This is a large part of the point of poetry, for instance.
Some writer, I forget who, made the analogy that some writing is like clear glass, meant to be looked through, where the point is to be as transparent as possible, while some writing is like stained glass, meant to be looked at.
By the standards of many others, I read very fast. I know that this is because, like ecg above, I don’t read every word; rather just skim the text for the sense of it. I remember at school being taken to task for not reading some book simply because I had not spent enough time looking at the pages. I easily disproved the assertion by being able to answer questions on the text.
I do find however, that although I can happily skip over words I don’t recognise, relying on context for the meaning, I do sometimes reach the end of a paragraph and have to re-read it more slowly to fully understand it. None of this really works for technical writing and there I find it necessary to read every word.
Minor and esoteric grammatical and spelling errors are not really a problem, but homophones and misplaced punctuation can completely destroy the flow - too many and I will discard the book. I have little trouble with Shakespeare but can only follow Chaucer in translation.
Same problem here. I rely on context. That’s for prose though, reading technical manuals is a different mode, it’s all parsing and I have the opposite problem where I can pick up all the details and miss the big picture.
I very much like that analogy, and I’d never thought of it that way before. I don’t like the stained glass books, for the most part
I don’t skim the text but I don’t parse words individually either. I’ll take sentences as a whole and with them construct a visual if necessary. The visuals are almost analogous to what my dreams look like, where parts that are unimportant aren’t filled in, and things are not particularly distinct if it doesn’t need to be. Like scenes in a movie where whatever is outside of the frame can be in any state because it won’t be seen on screen. (Except also, that some things on screen aren’t filled in because it’s not important. The mercs are wearing armor - except doesn’t matter what kind so long as it’s there - I present a grey idea of one in scene, no details)
Books with too many words and too many descriptions interrupt this flow and fill the scenes with too much junk that frankly, I don’t care about, and I was going to conjure up anyway. I was recommended a book of this type that I’m reading right now. I’m a third of the way in and only about three things have happened (none of it actually starting the adventure), but a whole lot of description of sunlight dappling and waves lapping and tanned skin has been going on. You can just get that over with in a paragraph rather than take 15 pages per locale and I can fill in the rest, thanks.
I generally don’t construct a mental visual picture while reading. I may think about it in a visual format afterwards, but generally when I read I consider the narrative first. It’s one of the reason I really enjoy interesting writing styles or clever uses of language. Postmodern works that jump back and forth and reference each other tend to excite me as well, as I like that word play - whereas works that are linear, with relatively simple language, and seem to be consciously attempting to want the reader to construct a visual as they are read tend to bore me a bit.
Not so much a specifically visual picture, but one that has the same kind of spatial-diagrammesque relationships. It’s so close to visual that I don’t realize it isn’t visual until I attempt to draw it on paper (I’ve been excited enough about some stuff I was reading to have tried it).
I am glad you posted this. I tend to read as you descibed but had never thought of it like that. I am presently working on a novel which is a struggle for a non writer such as myself. I plan to keep this in mind as I am writing. It feels more comfortable to me.
Speed reader: this means I look at a big chunk of words at a time, but also that bad formatting drives me nuts.
I view the situation and tend to skip the detailed descriptions (sorry Mr. Verne), but at the same time clunky sentences, bad grammar, typos… jump at me.
I think maybe I’ve spent too much time as an editor Between that and always having been an above-average speller (which was in part what led to all the editing), it’s as if I’m actually looking at the text in two or three different levels.
The positive side is that there are some horrible pieces of text that I have to slog through for professional reasons, and I’ve discovered that I can keep my attention on them and my blood pressure down if I take it as an editing exercise. “Sentence fragment… gender mismatch… missing subject… oh God only two more slides to go, hallellujah but sweet Jesus who gave this guy a pass in his fourth grade English?”
While I do get a mental movie going, the words themselves contribute to the experience. Perhaps the best analogy is that something poorly written is like watching a movie on your phone with low-quality streaming. Elegant language used properly to communicate the message is like sitting in an IMAX theater. Somewhere in the middle is functional but not stylistic language, which is like a decent home TV
Perhaps it’s the fact that I have done work as an editor and a writer, but I notice grammatical mistakes and I sometimes subconsciously start rewriting an awkward sentence or paragraph. I’m pretty picky about what I call good, but I can enjoy almost anything well enough.
So anyway, it’s definitely a combination of medium and message for me.
I don’t feel I visualize when I’m reading. I don’t “see” the characters or scenes in my mind. I feel good writing is more an exchange of ideas; that when I read a well-written passage it transfers thoughts from the author’s mind to my own.
I do read (or scan) every word…but, like bump, my consciousness is on a different plane of perception. The words, as Thudlow Boink says, are clear glass, and I’m looking through them, not really at them.
I don’t speed read, usually. Once, I had the experience of forced speed-reading, as I was printing out a novel, and was watching the pages as they came out, about one page every three seconds. Later, I read that book in a normal way, and was astonished how much of it I had already comprehended, just from a three-second glance at each page.
What a beautiful metaphor. FWIW, I pretty much read like the OP, but my wife pays much more attention to the style. Still, when I am finished a book I know whether it is well written.
Usually, first time through something, I am reading more for content; reading the words as written. If I find it interesting enough, I go back to the beginning and try to build a mental picture or (in the case of non-fiction) place it in context with things I already know or other books I have read.
I do not visualize anything when I read 99.99% of the time. I was in fact unaware that **anyone **did until the year after college when Harry Potter became popular and I wondered why people praised the books for making kids use their imaginations. That made no sense to me because JK Rowling told them the story, and they didn’t have to come up with the plot themselves, so what could they be imagining?? Several articles into people expressing the same sentiment, someone finally said that they were imagining it like a movie as they read. That has never happened for me for more than a fragment of a scene. I was fascinated, and then shocked to learn it’s actually common. When I read a story, it’s like someone is literally telling me something - all I do is “hear” the words, and I see nothing. This also makes things like baseball games on the radio almost completely meaningless to me.
The truly odd thing to me is that I’ve had more than one person who has read a story I’ve written say they could imagine “it happening just like a movie!”…and I don’t imagine what I write much more than what I read, so even I don’t do it to my own stories. I guess I’m glad that I’m able to paint a picture for others, even if I don’t for myself.
Between that and always having been an above-average speller (which was in part what led to all the editing), it’s as if I’m actually looking at the text in two or three different levels.