Transcription
This week we're going to talk about a very simple idea that's going to get you from someone who's really confused by complex paragraphs or complex books, especially nonfiction books that you're struggling to understand. And the automatic conclusion that we all have is basically, "I am stupid." I can't understand books because if you know, if this book is understandable, I speak English, I read English, why can't I understand any of it?
And if you want to take anything away from today's video, it's simply this. This problem right here, this reading problem is not an intelligence problem. It is merely a skill problem that you've inherited from the shitty English education system or from the education system that really never bothered to teach you what it takes to read well or to teach you how to get the message out of a pretty complicated paragraph.
So, as your substitute English teacher today, we're going to cover two exercises or two aspects of reading that anyone can work on. It takes a bit of time, takes a bit of getting used to, but once you get into the habit of doing these two exercises when you read after a few months, your ability to tackle difficult material will skyrocket. And you will be able to tackle whatever material that you want to tackle. And this, especially in the age of AI, this is a superpower. The power to explore whatever subject that you want to explore without language, without letting language get in the way. I think this is a worthy skill to pursue.
So, these two aspects of reading that underpin most of how we consume information or how we even register information are comprehension and coherence. To put it simply, comprehension's all about understanding what the words are about on a page. For example, when you study a new field like history, words like sovereignty, words like colonialism, words like multiculturalism, these words won't automatically make sense to you if you don't know what the word is pointing to.
So, in case you encounter a paragraph that's really dense and difficult, the first pass that you have to do is to slow down. And slowing down is not an act of, you know, declaring defeat. You know, "I think I'm too dumb to understand this. Why can't I just understand it straight away?" But slowing down to gather the definitions of words you don't understand, concepts that are not quite clear to you yet. This should be seen as an investment because as you define one word, and if you if you see the same word again two pages later, in most cases you don't have to look that up again. View building comprehension as you investing different things into a bank of words or a bank of ideas. And over time, this bank of ideas is going to start to grow. You're going to start to understand everything a little bit better. And when you move on to another book that contain these words and ideas, you'll be able to read a lot faster. This grows at an exponential scale, not that reading fast is the point of of today's video. But over time, you start to see that that even understanding one key idea will unlock a whole sphere of different readings for you. And over time, yes, you'll get to a point where you can recognize most of the words on a page. You know the definition of most of these words, and reading reading becomes really enjoyable from that point onward.
And the second aspect of reading that throws a lot of people for a loop is coherence. In short, if comprehension wants you to understand the individual building blocks of a paragraph or of an idea or of an argument, coherence wants you to trace how this idea moves or how this argument moves. And one of the quickest ways to do this is to spot the connectives. In grammar, there's a group of words called conjunctions that also come with uh subsections like coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions. Then again, if you want to know what is what, go check out my guide at amugofinsights.org. It's a grammar guide for people who hate grammar.
So, this is a a primer for people who want to get into the finer grains of how language works and in turn how to improve your reading. But nevertheless, the main function of a conjunction is to join different sentences together or to join sentences together without using full stops because if we use full stops all the time, all the sentences would sound pretty clunky. And on the other hand, these conjunctions also provide logical relations between different ideas. Hence, if you want to grasp how an argument or how an idea is flowing on a page, the quickest way to do that is to spot these connecting words. To let these connecting words tell you how the idea is moving on a page. Some common connectives or conjunctions include and, which shows sequence; because, shows relation; however, shows an exception; therefore, shows an explanation. Different connective words, they serve these very distinct functions. So, as you go through a difficult section of a text that you don't really understand, these words are your keys to understand how the idea is moving on a page.
And when combined with comprehension, if you already know what the definitions of these words mean, that's what creates a powerful reading experience when you're able to tell what the ideas first of all mean and being able to trace how these ideas are moving on a page. And this is essentially the two main mechanisms of reading. Like I said before, every one of your reading problems probably come down to one of these two factors.
So, as a series of practical exercises, this week after you've finished today's video, make sure to return to a difficult book and pick out a difficult paragraph that you're having some trouble understanding. And exercise number one to build comprehension, I want you to take a difficult paragraph from one of these books that you're currently reading >> [snorts] >> and circle every unfamiliar word out there. I know some people out there are going to say, you know, "If I do this for every paragraph, I'll never finish the book." Well, the beauty here is if you simply do this exercise on one paragraph, you probably don't need to do this again for a few paragraphs that follows that paragraph. Again, learning new definitions and learning comprehension or gathering a bank of ideas and words, this is an investment that's really going to expand what you can read and what you can comprehend in the long run. So, circle and define every unfamiliar word on a page. Look them up. You only need a brief definition, and then reread the paragraph to see if things start to make a little more sense.
And once you get into the habit of collection and definition to expand your comprehension, let's move on to exercise number two. And this is when you have to go back to that paragraph. And then now, instead of circling unfamiliar words, I want you to circle the connective words that glue the entire paragraph together. Do you see an "and"? And is the author showing a sequence of arguments? Do you see "therefore"? Is the author introducing a conclusion after providing a lot of evidence? Do you see "however"? Is an exception being introduced after however? Remember, connecting words, aka conjunctions, they are the linchpins that hold an idea together. Without them, the whole text would fall apart. It wouldn't make any logical sense. So, if you can go in there and to retrace the shape of the paragraph, they'll make your reading experience a lot less taxing because now at least you have a general overview of the flow of the paragraphs. And just like comprehension, the more of these connectives you collect, the more you build up a backlog of how these words are functioning in a text. And over time, you probably don't need to look this up every time you read a book. But for the first couple of books, if you read through them with these two exercises, over time, you're going to wake up one day and a book that was very difficult to you will start to appear like, you know, it's it's really all right to read. I can understand everything now.
So, in conclusion, difficult writing becomes easy once we see that there are these mechanisms holding them together, at least in the case of nonfiction. And if you can learn to see that, in fact, wrestling with every difficult book out there or every difficult book that you wrestle with, they will all expand your comprehension or expand your ability to read permanently. So, that over time this becomes a life skill. This becomes a formidable force in your life where you're able to explore different weird interests that you have, not through second-hand opinions on the internet, but first-hand through accessing a piece of text without bias. And over time, as you practice some of the ideas in these videos and as you practice some of the techniques and exercises that I give you every single week, you're going to start to see that this really is a superpower. And I'm very excited to share more perspectives and ideas around this topic of learning how to read and write. Or in other words, teaching you all the stuff that you should have learned in your English classes. And if you've enjoyed this week's video, make sure to sign up for a free newsletter over at amugofinsights.org. Every week, we send out a newsletter around these topics, around how to read, write, and think better. And recently, we've just started a new series around plain English that's going to give you the basic composition skills to write powerful sentences. Nevertheless, that's all I have for this week's video, and I'll be back here next week with more. Robin Walden here. Take care and goodbye.