Massimo Curatella

Tag: reading

  • Contextual Paraphrasing Must Be Done Early

    Paraphrasing a concept is a way to extract knowledge while interpreting its meaning. It promotes understanding, memorization, and thus learning. The rewriting should happen immediately after the annotation to maximize leveraging the freshly acquired context. It becomes less efficient and practical to collect highlights first and then trying to make sense of them and finally rewriting them. That means reading much slower than just going over the text while quickly taking notes. But it means also saving time in rereading and reinterpreting the context after the superficial first iteration. Further rereading is still useful, by understanding better and better the concept expressed by the author we open up the possibilities for connection and even deeper understanding.

    Paraphrasing contextually requires a change of habit if you are used to reading quickly and highlight what interests you. You still have to reread the source but it makes you more effective and efficient when you stop, make an effort to interpret what caught your attention, and rewrite it with your words into notes to add to your archive.

    Article 324.

  • Note-Taking is Personal

    Summarizing an article means compressing information. If I am able to reduce an article to a summary, annotated and I can efficiently remember what’s in it, I should be able to read my summary and throw away the source. But besides filler words or elaborated ways of conveys meaning, when I am summarizing I am interpreting that content. So I need an intention. I should have clarified the reason why I am reading that source and what I want to do with the knowledge I can extract from it. So a summary can never be universal, each reader will do their own version of their summary and their notes. That’s also why the value of personal notes is limited unless you are annotating for specific public and you are curating the readability and the consistency of your notes.

  • The Power of Rereading

    I always thought I could read a text once and get its essence. While deep reading the current text I am at my third iteration of the first chapter and I keep on discovering new things. Some are substantial topics treated superficially which I had just skipped, some others are nuances and implications that emerge only if you really connect all pieces. It helped me writing notes with pen and paper, copying and redoing diagrams. By annotating the diagrams in my notes with the author’s explanation I find them richer and I can connect more of my experience. The more I read it the less I have new questions (I have already accumulated a bunch of them) and the more I can make internal connections. My greatest challenge is exactly this, going through the boredom of rereading a piece of text while looking for new insights. I am slow, this is taking me ages but I am satisfied with this new approach to learning.

  • Reviewing Notes While Deep Reading

    At the of of the first chapter, in the book I am deep reading, I have more questions than answers. Besides the internal ones, related to the treatment the author reserved for the topic, I have a lot of external questions. Or, at least, questions pushing towards comparisons, similarities, counterarguments: ways of connecting notes. That is, finally, the place where I can reference my notes: where did I write about the mentioned topics? Who wrote about something similar? How can I debate the author’s position? This is an inspiring context to review and connect my collection of thoughts and references.

    I am going slow, rather slower than usual. But I feel close to the knowledge shared by this chapter’s author. It’s taking me several days and it’s like having a continuous conversation with what I read and what I can connect. I feel less rushed towards complete the book and passing the next one. Although I am now in the critical stage of reviewing my notes and rereading, where needed, the related passages (the place where usually I get lost), I enjoy the sensation of a close encounter with other minds, carefully and accurately considering what they have to say.

    And I like it.

    This is my daily post 316.

  • Finding Questions While Reading

    While deep reading a book on creativity I am gathering useful questions. At the introduction I had already found some prompts to go deeper in the announced sections. Priming your brain before the actual experience opens up to ingest and digest information better. That approach is going in the opposite direction, now. I am collecting more questions than quotes and I feel very critical towards the author. It’s good, in principle, but my goal, in the end, should be the one of learning principles and concepts based on experience and rationality while finding new and useful connections. This seems like a first iteration in my reading process. It will be interesting to go over the accumulated notes and question during a second reading. It would be even better finding connections and commonalities or counterarguments when reading other books. Exciting.

  • Deep Reading: Authors and Sources

    I am starting to have a good pace with my private writing practice. Early morning, instead of late at night. I decided to pick a book and to slowly, accurately and deeply read it page by page. By going slow I was able to collect so many questions and connections that I got already a lot of inspiration. Even before getting into the first chapter.

    Checking the background of the authors give a sense on their authority on the subject. When it’s an anthology or a collection of already published essays, it helps to trace it back to the original source. How is the collection curated? Are those the best articles? Is it worth it to find the original publications of to follow in their next issues? It’s a great way to gather sources around the book topic.

    It’s useful to compile lists of the mentioned authors and books. They can be cross-referenced or selected to be read when you want to go deeper.

    It’s also important to put the book in the context of the time when it was published. How was it relevant? How is it considered today, if it is not recent? The publications at the source of the selected essays are still published today? What’s their reputation.

    I’ve only read the introduction and I feel like I’ve learned a lot.