Hello Reader,

What is most important: fast reading or deep understanding?

If you ask me I would say “both” and “it depends” 😅

Both are important because our time is limited and the amount of sources we want (or have to) read grows faster than we can read them. So we want to read for deep understanding, but as quickly as possible.

But it also depends. Some sources are so good that we want to savour them. We want to read slowly, reflect on every sentence, and have it deeply resonate with us. Other sources… well, a skim read or a chatGPT summary would be all we need.

The challenge is that speed and understanding are in contradiction to each other. The faster you read the less meaning you extract from your sources. So if we are to read fast (or at least faster), we better have a way to extract as much meaning as we can.

And that is the goal of Active Reading.

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Active Reading is the ability to engage with a source from multiple perspectives and extract deep meaning from it.

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​I like to explain active reading by pointing to the difference between hearing, passive listening, and active listening.

Hearing means to acknowledge the sounds and perhaps the words someone has said. It is like a teenager playing a video game while barely hearing their mom asking them to clean the room.

In reading, hearing is the equivalent of looking. That’s when we read the same paragraph 4 times without capturing anything because our mind was wandering.

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Listening means understanding the meaning of what someone is trying to say. We don’t just hear the words, but we interpret the meaning of those words.

There are two types of understanding: shallow understanding and deep understanding.

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Shallow understanding is associated with passive listening. That’s when we capture what another person is saying but we don’t let it resonate with us (i.e. we don’t connect it to our knowledge, our experiences, and things we care about). We “get it” and let it go.

In reading, that’s what I call passive reading. That’s when we read, understand, highlight, and let it go — just to forget nearly everything a few weeks later and have to reread it to remember.

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Deep understanding is associated with active listening. That’s when we let other people’s words resonate with us. It is an empathic form of listening.

In reading, that’s what I call active reading. That’s when we read, understand, and look at the same text from multiple perspectives, so we can always extract something new from our sources.

But there are three dangers in active reading.

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Dangers in Active Reading

If you just take Active Reading as “let your sources resonate with you” without any methods to support you, then you may fall into three traps:
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1. As you let the source resonate with you, you may start attributing your thoughts to the source.

For research, this is a big mistake (almost a sin)! You may mistakenly attribute your knowledge to an author and misquote them, or you may believe that you have no new knowledge to contribute as everything you can think about “already exists” in the sources you read.

The solution for this problem is simple though: be mindful of which mindset you are using when reading the source, take notes (so you can reflect on those notes later on), and separate (in your notes) what the authors are saying from what you are saying.

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2. You want to closely read e-ve-ry-thing!

Active Reading is not the same as reading a source line by line.

You can actively read while skimming, you can actively read while scanning a source, and you can also actively read while doing a close reading.

Everything depends on how much time you have and how important that source is for you.

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3. You deeply engage with a source.. and forget.

If you spend time reading a source, then make sure you take notes. Notes not only of what generated the thoughts (i.e. the quote or highlight) but notes of the thoughts you had. These thoughts are your knowledge!

That’s when pairing Active Reading with Active Note-Taking becomes so powerful.

You read a source, take notes from both what you learned from the source and your own thoughts, and now you have seeds to build your own contribution while having a direct link to a source related to it.

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How to learn and do active reading?

I won’t come up with vague advice for you such as “be open to the meaning”, “just feel the source”, or generic things that don’t have any meaning to you.

Also, active reading is not paraphrasing!

Instead, active reading is a skill with:

• Mindsets that allow you to prime your mind to observe the source from different perspectives (I teach 6 mindsets that can help you look at a source from an almost infinite number of angles).
• Methods to put those mindsets into practice and avoid the three traps we mentioned.
• Tools. There are not many tools tailored for Active Reading as the process happens mostly inside our minds. Even so, we can get some simple support from our note-taking tools for that.

When doing active reading, you engage as much in “creation” as you engage in “understanding”. It helps you engage deeply with a source and more easily remember it.

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But there is limited advantage to active reading if you can't express the knowledge you have just acquired.

So if you want to learn all mindset changes and methods you need to start expressing your knowledge within your notes, join the waitlist for the Active Note-Taking course.

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And if you are a note-taking pro and want to learn Active Reading, I have a live course offer coming up for you. Just email me to learn more before the official announcement.

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In this series, we have now covered:

• Active Note-Taking
• Active Reading

When applying these two skills you have notes filled with your knowledge and related to the sources you have studied.

The next step? Organise your notes to optimise them for knowledge creation (a.k.a. the ultimate goal of research).

And that is the topic for next week’s Playbook.

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Talk to you soon.

Until then, take care.

Bianca