Chapter 3 Summary

Corey Place & Gena Gilbertson

This chapter begins with asking the question, “What is Reading?” Most people do not entirely realize the process while they are taking part in this action because of how second nature it becomes for a person. Reading is not simply an action where you spell out words, but rather a thought process that interprets symbols and what they mean to an individual person. Of course the information must be clear and understood by its intended audience along with the fact that an audience will absorb the information more with visual aids and stimulating words or accessories that will put emphasis on the information. Now when readers do read it is mentioned in Chapter 3 that they fall into one of the following four categories;

--Reading to assess
--Reading to learn
--Reading to learn to do
--Reading to do

The chapter is also quite helpful in letting a reader know that it’s not the words themselves but how they are presented to the reader. The words themselves hold style value in how they are presented. Some people can have a tendency of daydreaming or loosing interest in a piece of reading so the book lists a few simple tasks that a reader can do to ensure that all the information is absorbed.

--Skim the entire document so see if you can get a general idea of what the piece of reading is trying to tell you.
--Scan the document for a few special words or terms that you think are going to be of value in conveying the information.
--Predict some of the questions that a normal reader may ask about the information and see if you can gather those answers based on the reading.

The chapter puts emphasis on not only what the reader can do to obtain the information better, but what a presenter can do as well. Chunking together information, putting important points in bold, or categories lined with bullets can burn a relationship between a reader and the information being presented.
This chapter goes through many ideas that people tend to forget when presenting information. The way that you present ideas has just as much of an impact as the ideas themselves. This works both ways for the reader or listener in the fact that they need to do more than just listen to the words, but need to comprehend the concepts and terms in the context of the topic.