31–40 of 89 posts
I am a scientist and I have to read sometimes hundreds of pages of dense scientific literature in a given week while doing other things that my job requires. I also find reading long difficult text to be hard. However, over the years I found two things that allowed me to get better at it: 1. Just read A LOT. There is no way around it. If you push yourself to do this, eventually your mind will figure out a way. 2. Mar…
It's never easy but it gets easier. Do it a lot.
One should understand that not all processes in life take 45 minutes. Learning meaningful content is like going to the gym or playing the piano - you cannot expect to see any meaningful results in a day. You'll have to put in the work for a very long time, but you'll get better at it as you go. Analogy aside, not all text is written to be read in a 45 min session. Set your mind that reading and absorbing content from…
It should not take someone a week to read a research paper. Depending on the paper maybe a day but usually a few hours. Carefully studying it is something else and that might take a week, but not every paper needs that kind of attention and it's a valuable skill to learn skimming and differentiating between un-/valuable and un-/interesting papers.
Most papers can be read in I'm caricaturing, but only a tiny bit, this is how I read. And for good stuff, that I want to understand, a page an hour is (often) pretty typical for my first fairly thorough read.
I've written two textbooks, and in both cases I thought of the book as the distilled outcome from reading about a dozen very important papers really thoroughly
Textbooks may be introductory in nature, or may be advanced and assume a lot of prerequisite knowledge.
If you are trying to learn about something new, you have to start with the basics.
If you are struggling and finding that the text makes no sense at all then ask yourself if you are diving too deep too fast.
Words per minute is a poor metric for judging your reading. Information density per word varies greatly, and if the information is new to you, it will take much more time.
But why judge you reading ability at all? It takes the time it takes. While there are ways to speed it up a bit, the inescapble question is, what is worth reading during our short lives?
I am a scientist and I have to read sometimes hundreds of pages of dense scientific literature in a given week while doing other things that my job requires. I also find reading long difficult text to be hard. However, over the years I found two things that allowed me to get better at it: 1. Just read A LOT. There is no way around it. If you push yourself to do this, eventually your mind will figure out a way. 2. Mar…
Part of what slows people down reading scientific papers is akin to that person's absorptive capacity. When you start reading something, you come in with a host of prior knowledge: terms, phrases, principles, etc that you know and understand. The more of these things you have when reading relevant to the piece you're reading, the more quickly you can read, digest, critize, etc.
I've read this particular GFS paper a long time ago and this is a domain I can read through fairly rapidly (pro tip: read the abstract and conclusions first to make sure it's worth your time to read the meat of the paper given academic incentives to publish anything anymore).
I've worked with some medical professionals doing work on partial arthroplasty related techniques (adding 3D volume reconstructive techniques) and the paper took me forever to get through and contribute to because like you, every paragraph was me looking up medical terminology and trying to incorporate that into my baseline knowledge. My absorptive capacity was very low in that context.
In general, the more generalized scientific knowledge you have, the easier it is to pickup and read these papers quickly (if they've been written for a general scientific audience). If they're CS papers, clearly CS foundations help (theory, nomenclature, current and past popular trends, etc.).
When faced with a large, imposing text, my method is:
1. Read the title page, table of contents, index, and introduction several times. This should make it clear what the book is about and how it’s structure.
2. Read it straight through from start to end. No notes. Don’t worry about not understanding. Intellectually, I’m very passive. Just familiarizing myself with the terrain. Keep in mind the knowledge gained from the previous step.
3. Read through again, paying attention to key concepts and terms. Make a list of key concepts and terms. Try to understand and resolve the concepts and terms in relation to each other and the structure of the text. This is still very passive reading. You shouldn’t be forming any opinions at this point.
4. Create your own outline of the text. If the table of contents is well thought out, this might be redundant. Still very passive. No opinions yet.
5. Go through again, summarizing all the key ideas. Still very passive, you’re just trying to map out the text. Not forming opinions.
6. Rewrite the outline, now including your summaries.
7 and above. Now, if necessary, start actively critiquing. That’s a whole different matter. And usually involves playing the author off other authors. You usually don’t get to this part. I’ll refer you back to “How to Read a Book.”
The key thing is to focus on passively understanding, rather than opinion formation.
I strongly suggest “How to Read a Book” by Adler. It’s an excellent discussion of types and levels of reading. When faced with a large, imposing text, my method is: 1. Read the title page, table of contents, index, and introduction several times. This should make it clear what the book is about and how it’s structure. 2. Read it straight through from start to end. No notes. Don’t worry about not understanding. Intell…
Most subjects have countless written material. Skimming many first to decide which is worth it's weight will lead to a better outcome. It's more motivating too when you know you've found a gem.