While the following isn’t really a textbook, I highly recommend it for helping you to improve your skill as a reader. “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. It covers a variety of different techniques from how to analytically take apart a book to inspectional techniques for getting a quick overview of a book.
I never knew how to read analytically, I had never been taught any techniques for actually learning from a book. I always just assumed you read through it passively.
It has a fairly large appendix (~70 pgs) of recommended reading and sample tests/examples at the end of the book. It also has several sections on reading subject specific matter i.e. How to read History, Philosophy, Science, Practical books, etc. It also covers agreeing or disagreeing with an author, fairly criticizing a book, aids to reading.
I think reading strategies may have been too narrow a choice of words. It really covers the “Art of Reading”. A good set of English classes would probably cover similar ground, although I didn’t see anything like this in my high school or undergraduate education.
Second the vote for this book, though there is quite a bit of fluff (most of the chapters on strategies for readings specific topics I found less than useful) - it really does a great job of explaining how to extract information from a book.
The key insight I took away was that a book isn’t just a long string of words broken up into various sections—a book is a little machine that produces an argument, and to really understand that argument you need to figure out what the machine is doing.
While the following isn’t really a textbook, I highly recommend it for helping you to improve your skill as a reader. “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. It covers a variety of different techniques from how to analytically take apart a book to inspectional techniques for getting a quick overview of a book.
I never knew how to read analytically, I had never been taught any techniques for actually learning from a book. I always just assumed you read through it passively.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095
It looks interesting, but I am surprised it’s 400 pages long, is there really that much in the way of reading strategies?
It has a fairly large appendix (~70 pgs) of recommended reading and sample tests/examples at the end of the book. It also has several sections on reading subject specific matter i.e. How to read History, Philosophy, Science, Practical books, etc. It also covers agreeing or disagreeing with an author, fairly criticizing a book, aids to reading. I think reading strategies may have been too narrow a choice of words. It really covers the “Art of Reading”. A good set of English classes would probably cover similar ground, although I didn’t see anything like this in my high school or undergraduate education.
Second the vote for this book, though there is quite a bit of fluff (most of the chapters on strategies for readings specific topics I found less than useful) - it really does a great job of explaining how to extract information from a book.
The key insight I took away was that a book isn’t just a long string of words broken up into various sections—a book is a little machine that produces an argument, and to really understand that argument you need to figure out what the machine is doing.