Reading Frames

Herewith a small excerpt from The Book Thief’s The Standover Man.

All my life,

I’ve been scared of

of men standing over me.

If all went as planned, you did not spot anything strange.  Now, read it out loud.  You’ll immediately spot the error.  (There is a chance you’ll just see it from the start, but eh, you get the drift.)

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This is a method that works extremely well.  The mind works in wondrous ways when reading, if you haven’t noticed already.  A while back, I made a post about the speed of reading which included three ways in which the human mind reads.  I think the whole language method is applicable here.  Or maybe it is something else entirely.

Back in the day when I programmed in QBasic, the animated sprites I made for my games consisted out of maybe three frames.  For argument’s sake, let’s say it was a guy swinging a sword.  The animation frames would go a little something like this : |  /  _   (First a vertical line, then a diagonal and then a flat one, each representing a different position of the sword.)

When show all three after each other, I get an animation that looks like the swinging of a sword, even though the eye works at a lot more than 3 (maybe six) frames a second.  As you (should) know, the mind fills in the blanks and makes it a smooth transition.

I think the same works with reading too.  When the mind sees two “of”s after each other, it realises the typo and presents you with the correct sentence instead of the one with the error.  But when you read aloud, you read each word separately (Phonics or Holistic word recognition) and then you spot the mistake.

So in conclusion, when you finish the final draft of your story, read it out loud to catch all the errors.

Side Note : Somewhere today I read aloud.  The sentence was “one at a time” but I somehow changed it to “one by one”.  The two have a similar meaning, so maybe it was my mind that replaced the slightly harder to say sentence with the easier synonym…

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Read Speed

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I am a pretty slow reader.  But what determines the speed at which I read?

Science Daily posted this article in 2007 in which they discuss the different factors that affect reading speed.  I’ll do a quick breakdown for you.

1) Phonics

With this, you recognise words by decoding them letter by letter.  In other words, it’s the combination of letters that allow you to recognise it.

2) Holistic Word Recognition

With this, you recognise words by their shape.  Basically, your mind will already start recognising the word “and” just by the flat and then up shape it has.  (I’m guessing that most people will then confirm their suspicion, unconsciously, by turning to phonics.)

3) Whole Language

This one lets you know the meaning of a word by the sentence’s context.  As far as I understand, this means that you can guess a word in a sentence by relying on the rest of the words in it.  I’m thinking it works much the same way as figuring out the meaning of a word you don’t know.  The rest of the sentence (as well as the bigger context) gives you a hint at what word/meaning it is.  (You’d probably go back to a lower order method to confirm again.)

These three factors affect how fast you read.  Interestingly enough, they work separate from each other.  Each makes contributions to the overall speed on its own.

With the little that I know of speed-reading, I would guess that the higher up the order you go, the faster you read.  With speed reading, you often skip words because you already know what they are (i.e. “and”, “then”, etc.).  It works basically the same as Whole Language.  Also, when you recognise a word by its shape, you have no need to read it.  You know what it is and move on.

You lose speed when you read every word, but unless you have a very good database of words in your head so that you can recognise words without error, you’ll probably make some mistakes if you read at a complete Whole Language level (which is probably not entirely possible).  

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"I work better alone," says your subconscious

To be a writer, you have to read.  Some people suggest reading outside your genre, others suggest reading only your genre.  I say, read what you want.

Why do writers have to read?  To check out the competition?  To set goals of what they wish their work to look like one day?  Not exactly.  I’m pretty sure that there is some disagreement on this, but the general consensus is that you read in order to see what other people did that worked and what other people did that did not.

I’ve heard people say that they read books as writers, i.e. differently than other people.  They look for things the author used and ways in which the words are stacked up to deliver an impact.  I’ve never understood this.  I read because I like stories.  That’s it.  I can’t bring myself to read a 100k words simply to learn a lesson from the author.  I’m aware that it isn’t as simple as that, but I can’t specifically look for writerly messages hidden inside the words.  That way, reading a book becomes work and I read to not work.  If reading became work, I’d never read anything.  Ergo, reading should be fun.

Am I losing valuable information?  Am I being a lazy bum for not wanting to put a little effort into improving my craft?  I don’t think so.

You see, I trust my subconscious.  I trust that my subconscious will do all the work for me.

When I was in high school, I avoided studying for English Language.  Why?  Because the grammar rules confused me to no end.  There were little bits of information that made no sense to me.  In fact, if I were to write a test where the questions were along the lines of ‘Identify the conjugated verb in the above sentence’ and more complicated ones, I’d be lucky to get 50.  Instead, I read.

Every word I read gets meticulously spun around in my subconscious and recorded somewhere (you’d have to ask Livia if you want to know where; possibly the limbic system).  I could spell and construct sentences with the best of them.  Why?  Because my mind had recorded all the grammatically correct sentences that I’d read.  Therefore, if a new sentence is compared to the recorded ones, it can tell me if something is wrong.  ‘The apples is in the basket’ just sounds wrong, because my subconscious has been conditioned into recognising correct grammar.

My point in all this is the following:  I read without studying, but I can still learn new things from it.  My subconscious will record the information and let me know when something is amiss.

If you are consciously looking for things instead of reading, you might even be hampering your subconscious from doing what it’s supposed to do (much in the same way I avoided thinking too much about the grammar rules).  Let your subconscious do its job.

You can’t learn everything from your subconscious, but there are a lot of things you can.  Read what you want, and read for fun.  Let your subconscious do the writer reading for you and enjoy the ride.

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