Elizabeth Wise

I honestly don’t remember learning to read as a child. I’m sure my mother read to me, and if I squint I can almost see us sitting down on the sofa and reading golden-spined storybooks together. I think the vast majority of learning to read, and group reading, was done in school. And yet… I’ve always been ahead of the curve when it came to reading level. So, who knows?

I have always, and I continue to this day, to speed-read and skim when looking for specific answers. In fact, if it’s a definition, most of the time I just flip to the glossary or index to find what I’m looking for. But, if the subject is interesting or there’s not much of a time constraint, I’ll sit down and read an entire chapter of a textbook. It was a great way to study a bit ahead in history class while tuning out the rest of the lecture.

In school, we were taught multiple reading comprehension methods and yes, I remember SQ4R. I regard it with a distinct loathing, a sort of burning and seething hatred that rolls off from a simmering resentment fueled by the indignation that comes with being told how to digest a material. Because, you know, clearly I need to abide by this tacky and rigid formula in order to understand what I’m reading. Certainly it can’t be assumed that the girl with one of the highest reading scores in the building, nevermind the class, has already developed her own extremely similar methods of organizing information as she reads along.

No, I’m not bitter, I promise.

When I was younger, I was an absolutely voracious reader. The house was (still is) littered with the printed word. There were manuals everywhere, old textbooks belong to my mother, books for my sisters who were five years older than me. I remember adoring My Side of the Mountain and reading it and the sequels several times through elementary school. In high school, my mom introduced me to Anne McCaffrey. She became one of my favorite authors, I love the worlds she created and the way that The Dragonriders of Pern series shifted genres – post-post-post apocalyptic scifi, a frontier story dressed as an agrarian pseudo-Middle Ages feudal fantasy. What could be better than dragons and ancient supercomputers?

I stopped reading “real” books when I got to college – a dorm just doesn’t have a wide selection of books to pick up on a whim, and my time for checking out books and leisurely reading them was limited. However, I’ve been a roleplayer for years. What I do is less Dungeons & Dragons with the dice and the rulebooks, and is what the community called “post-by-post” forum roleplaying. It’s like collaborative creative writing. I do a lot of work to set up the beginnings of a story, a sandbox setting, and some starting conflicts but the real magic happens when the thread opens up to other players. I can’t control what they write (well, I can, within reason), and I can’t perfectly dictate what direction the story will go in. Will the bad guys win? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not really reading, in the sense that I’m critically examining published works of art for their underlying themes and cultural context. But, it’s a lot of writing and design and community management, and it’s so much fun.

As far as audiobooks go, I’ve never been a fan of them. I read so much faster than I listen, and I hate listening to things. It’s very hard for me to focus on both reading and listening at the same time – I have no idea why, but them’s the breaks. However, I’m told that they’re pretty awesome, and my mom checks out audiobooks from the library every so often and listens to them in the car.

For me, reading well was absolutely important in middle and high school. It just made things so much easier. I didn’t have to wait for the teacher to get to a certain part of the lecture or the lesson plan – if I had a question about geology I could just flip to a particular section of the textbook and read it a few times. Usually I was sorted by the time the teacher actually started taking questions. Reading well was also paramount to my success in standardized testing – man, don’t get between me and a bubble sheet. I’ve always been an average student, lacking motivation and discipline. But being able to read quickly and understand what I was looking at absolutely saved me. Whatever I failed in homework, I could make up in tests.

Reading well and solid reading comprehension has been disgustingly important in college. I say “has been”, because this is my fifth year as a college student (it’s a long story, a boulevard of broken dreams). What I’ve found from my experience is that the ability to deconstruct, analyze, and discuss written material is practically a free pass to success in a lot of classes. I had a leadership development class that I didn’t do so well in – I couldn’t remember the names of the different researchers, the titles of all the theories, and I was horrific with dates. But, I could sit down and discuss the material of the week and relevant articles with my professor and classmates, and prove that maybe while I didn’t know the material as well as I should have, I was perfectly competent and capable of understanding it. Being able to write well helped too, I suppose – though in my opinion, that skill comes with reading comprehension.

I have, to the best of my knowledge, no official or clinically diagnosed difficulties with reading or learning. Unofficially, I mentioned before that I have trouble focusing on reading and listening at the same time. Mostly this just means that I prefer to write in silence, and find music particularly easy to get distracted and carried away by.

Wow. Talk about concise.