Tackling Textbooks

I’m guessing that if you have to read a textbook, you have no

choice in the matter because a teacher or professor assigned it

to you. I bet your textbook is many pages long and would crush

your big toe if you happened to drop it there. And I imagine your

instructor assigns many pages as though you have nothing else to

do with your time, and you want some advice about speed reading

them so that you can go out (or, you know, get some sleep) later.

Earlier in this chapter, “Prereading nonfiction books” explains how

to examine a book to find out what information it offers before

you begin reading. The prereading advice for examining nonfiction

books also applies to textbooks. Here are some specific tips for

reading textbooks quickly:

 ✓ Read the glossary first (if your textbook has one). Taking the

time to acquire words you don’t know from the glossary is

worthwhile because it enables you to read the textbook that

much more quickly when the time comes to start reading.

 ✓ Scour the pages for graphs, charts, and tables. Especially

in science textbooks, graphs, charts, and tables sometimes

tell half the story. Acquainting yourself with these items is an

excellent way to get a feel for the information that the text-

book has to offer.

 ✓ Find out what your teacher or professor wants you to learn

from the textbook and seek out that info. No sense in slaving

over text you’re not accountable for. Plus, you probably paid

a small fortune for that textbook; your teacher or professor

owes you an explanation about what to read in it.

 ✓ Develop an underlining or note-taking scheme and mark the

textbook as you read. My favorite note-taking technique is to

draw a dot next to passages in the book that I think are impor-

tant or worth reviewing. Later, I can quickly scan for these

important passages. (See Chapter 10 for more on scanning.)

 ✓ Improve retention by reviewing and quizzing yourself.

When you finish reading a chapter or selection, pause a

moment and summarize to yourself what you just read.

Make up half a dozen questions about the material and then

answer them. This technique helps you retain what you read.

Retention matters more than usual when reading textbooks

because you’re usually quizzed or tested about textbook

material. And though this practice takes a bit more time ini-

tially, it actually saves you time in the long run because you

don’t spend as much time rereading later.

Discovering vocabulary

words by context

You can also acquire new vocabulary words by context in the

course of you reading. Whether you know it or not, you have a

built-in aptitude for learning words by context. You don’t have to

consult a dictionary in your reading when you want to understand

a new word. You learned new words by context when you first

began to speak, and you certainly don’t need to stop now. After

all, no 3-year-old ever consults a dictionary, and yet a 3-year-old’s

vocabulary grows at a very fast clip.

When you come across a word you don’t know, study it for a minute.

See whether any part of it looks familiar. Perhaps you recognize a

prefix, root, or suffix in the word that gives you a clue to its mean-

ing (later in this chapter, “Looking at Prefixes, Roots, and Suffixes”

explains what those elements are). Perhaps the sentence and para-

graph where the word is found tell you what the word means.

Consider these sentences. Can you tell by context what the words

in italics mean?

The Bishop carried a large crosier. It was shaped like a shep-

herd’s crook, only it was ornate and encrusted with jewels.

The English dramatist W.S. Gilbert, who once remarked “I hate

my fellow man,” was a famous misanthrope.

She loved to study, so much so that her friends started calling

her a bluestocking.

The amount of storage space on computers keeps getting

larger. My first computer had only 15 kilobytes of storage. My

next one had 20 gigabytes. Pretty soon we will measure stor-

age in terabytes and petabytes.

The main point to remember about enlarging your vocabulary

while you read is to not gloss over words you don’t know. Pause in

your reading and give them a moment’s thought. You can’t learn

new words if you don’t take the time to decode and absorb them.

To expand your vocabulary when reading, stretch your reading

boundaries a little. As well as reading the metro section of the

newspaper, for example, read the business section, where you

can find business terminology and investment jargon you’ve never

heard before. Read books outside your field of interest and scope

of understanding. Next time you find yourself staring at the myriad

of magazines on a magazine rack, choose a magazine you’ve never

read before. Stray to obscure aisles of the library or bookstore and

see what you discover.

Finding out about fuzzy thinking

and creativity

Being logical is good for some kinds of problems and being

emotionally in tune is useful for many more. But plenty of situ-

ations require something rather harder to pin down: creative

insight.

In these kinds of situations, lots of possible answers can

apply: in a sense, anything goes and the more the merrier

too. It’s not just at advertising confabs looking for new mar-

keting strategies, or design consultancy brainstorms coming

up with new ideas for the local supermarket car park that

benefit from creative insight, but so too do hard‐nosed

economists trying to work out how to reboot the economy,

and even doctors wondering why so many people seem to

be getting colds!

Yet in many situations people still want to end up with some-

thing that commands wide acceptance, rather than just their

own idiosyncratic opinion or view. In such cases, creative

thinkers have to be prepared to risk losing arguments and

admit that they’ve gone up blind alleyways.

Creativity is unstructured and unpredictable, which can

be difficult if you’re more used to analytical and logical

approaches. With creative thinking it is important to be able

to cope with risk, confusion, disorder and feeling that you’re

not progressing quickly. For example, many important

breakthroughs in science and innovation have resulted from

dreams or daydreams when the innovator wasn’t trying

so hard to find the answer. The rewards of creativity are

golden — and not just in the arts!