i'm not saying people shouldn't be reading more books, but i do think it's funny how many people thinking "reading comprehension" is just about how good you are at reading books and not like. criticial thinking skills.
Before my niece was in school and her first few summers, I babysat her pretty often, natch. Occasionally I'd take her to a movie (mostly as an excuse to watch a "kids" movie, ha) but there was a lot of PBS and Netflix because then I could lay out the grapes and crackers.
And after the movie, or every few episodes, I'd ask her, you know, what her favorite part was, or what did she think would happen next? Total glass eyes. Okay, okay, favorite is a bit much. Was there a part she liked? A character? ..... Any character's name?
I told my sister I was concerned of course. I got blown off. And then she started school and started getting notes about her reading comprehension and my sister was like but she knows how to read, I know she knows what words mean! And I was like no no no this is what I was talking about and like. Obviously I read the four year old picture books too but the example that came to mind was being disappointed we couldn't finish Carmen Sandiego and either not knowing or not wanting to tell me the main character's name.
And she's like, well that isn't reading.
Okay! So! The skill isn't named correctly but that's what it is!! That's what it is for a 4 year old, they should at least be on that level!
It's not about knowing the most words or the most complicated grammar, it's about being able to give a basic summary of a post and add a semi-relevant anecdote (lol). on its most basic level, it's about not pissing on the poor
A handful of people have told me I should have put my tags in the actual post so here you go:
The good thing about critical thinking skills is that they can be developed and improved upon with patience and practice
A lot of the things you think “just come naturally” or are “common sense” are actually things that you learned at some point. You just don’t remember learning them!
The one that I know that I learned in college because I remember having problems with it, and then it finally clicking, was warm and cool colors. Golden hour, or how to indicate cool or warm in art. It’s one of my very favorite ways to play with color, NOW, but, it took me most of a semester in a color focused art class, in my early twenties to SEE it.
Ugh. So many assignments where the teacher was like, “nope, bot there yet.” So many!! (So long ago, too. We were doing slide photography and showing the slides in class, every class meeting)
It was useful, to me, to encounter something that took so much work for me to actually see it. Before that, I had mostly just done what was easiest, what people told me I had a “talent” for.
No. The skill of learning new mental skills? The frustration tolerance to get through and get it to click? THAT was the most valuable thing I encountered in college because it applies to everything all the time everywhere.
And it’s good to understand that it is ALL SKILLS! All of it. The easy and the hard stuff. You CAN learn it. Figuring out how to get yourself to actually grasp it is harder, though. Different people learn in different ways.
The frustration tolerance, though. That was really hard for me. I am still working on it.
Both as a writer and as a general member of society, reading comprehension is a super important skill to have.
I think one of the ways that a lot of people get frustrated by how reading is taught in school is that some teachers will focus heavily on very specific details in books, and so you will end up being tested on reading retention rather than reading comprehension. I had a teacher in high school whose reading quizzes were all about random details in whatever passage we had been assigned for homework (e.g., how many minutes did it take for the floodwaters to get from Town A to Town B) rather than on the actual comprehension of the passage. This can make you feel like you can't do reading comprehension or are bad at it, because it's what you've been tested on (especially if you never took a literature class post-high school).
Here are some skills that I think are important for reading comprehension, whether you're approaching fiction, non-fiction, persuasive writing, or anything else:
Understanding the meaning of a sentence in isolation, a paragraph, a section, and the entire piece. That is to say, having the ability to both parse the meaning of a sentence on its own but also understand how a set of thoughts fit together. A great way to practice this is to try to explain what something means to someone else (can be a real person, a pet, a stuffed animal, whatever). When I'm working with the people who report to me to edit their writing, one of the things I will often ask them is to explain what they're saying in a very simple non-business way. This also works with someone else's writing--can you take what was written in explain or describe it in plain terminology? Can you summarize a chapter or even a book in a few sentences?
Fitting the writing within the context in which it was written or published. If you see an essay talking about women's safety, for example, that phrasing will mean something different depending on who is writing it. It is often clear from the rest of the essay what they mean by it, but it is key to comprehending the writing as a whole to understand the context in which it was written or published (for example, to know whether it is being used as a transphobic dogwhistle). Can you identify biases in the writing, either through how it's written or what you know about the author or place where it was published? We know some of the biases that will be present in a piece put out by the Heritage Foundation versus Planned Parenthood, even without knowing the author.
Identifying themes or messages in the writing. Some authors and some writing focuses much more heavily on themes or messages than others (for example, a persuasive essay will have a much greater focus on a persuasive message than an encyclopedia entry), but no writing is truly neutral, and themes, messages, or goals (intentional or not) are present in virtually every piece of writing. You don't need to write a five paragraph essay about everything you read, but it can be good practice to spend a little bit of time thinking about how the piece of writing presents certain information or people. If someone is described as "stubborn" versus "obstinate" or "brave" versus "foolhardy", it gives a sense of the message being presented about this person. if all characters of a certain race, gender, religion, etc. are presented a certain way, you can start to identify the message that the story is sending about that group--whether or not the author intended it.
Maintaining a critical view of information. This isn't strictly reading comprehension as much as media literacy, but I think they are connected enough to include here. Not everything you read is accurate or true, including things that agree with your pre-existing worldview, and the follow up to the three things I listed before is to identify what something is saying, the context in which it is saying it, and the messages it is putting across, and engaging critically with them rather than assuming it's all correct. To be clear, I'm not saying don't believe science or anything like that, but, for example, a lot of science reporting in major media is kind of awful and misleading, especially in the headlines. If you see a headline that reads bacon always causes cancer, it's important to look at the actual reporting, potentially even look at the study it's citing, and understand what is actually being said, not what looked flashy in a headline. Similarly, if you only see a piece of major news in one place, particularly not from a pre-established reliable news source (by which I mean something like NBC and not A Partisan Podcaster on Twitter), you need to double check it. That's not to say it's necessarily fake or misleading, but there's usually a reason only one person is saying something happened.
This is why teachers make you write essays, by the way. Trust me, teachers hate essays even more than you do. They are a bitch to grade and take a lot of time as well mental energy, much more than just marking a multiple-choice test. Every teacher I know is always like "uUuuGH, essays" and procrastinating on grading them. You don't want to write an essay? Try having to read fifty of them over a weekend when you'd rather be doing something fun. BUT! They assign them anyway because they are genuinely a really useful tool in evaluating reading comprehension. Writing out an essay (should) force you to think about the material and demonstrate your understanding of it. And the process of thinking about it and translating those thoughts into words is the point. We live in a very word-based society. Reading comprehension is the cardio of training your brain muscles. It's an important foundation for everything else.
