Journal shanen's Journal: Good reading and writing 1
Kind of a meta-comment from a typical slashdot "discussion". It was originally drafted there, so you have to excuse any glitches in the editing for the journal environment. (Basically I'm using the slashdot journal as a scribbling pad for ideas that will be lost in the contexts of their transient topical discussions.)
How do you assess good reading skills? Actually I think you have to start by considering good writing and why I don't do more of it. A good writer understands the reader's mind, but I rarely care. Unless someone is actually paying me for the extra effort, I'm basically quite content with gentle readers who believe whatever they want to believe. In contrast, a great writer understands the collective minds of many readers and smoothly and effectively transmits even quite complicated ideas into their minds.
However, on the reader side, I think the good reader assumes the author's mindset, and I have always found that to be the most efficient way to learn new things. There's even a simple metric of how well I'm doing it as my reading speed increases. For most books, I'm really blazing by the time I get to the last 100 pages or so. However, once again I fall short of greatness. Some of the metrics of greatness are how quickly the great reader can get into the author's head and the range of authors the great reader can handle. For example, mystery novels from a hundred years ago are quite different, and translations can be quite challenging, whether the translation is close or free.
On Writing (Score:2)
I'm halfway through Stephen King's On Writing. He says "What is writing? Telepathy, of course." He then explains what he meant by that.
Good writing is completely different than good reading. A good writer will suck a good reader into his or her universe and trap you there. Nobody can suck a bad reader into their universes.
If you get sucked in by good writing (I had to stop reading Michael Chrichton's books because they were TOO good) then you're a good reader. If you don't, you're neither a good nor bad rea