Ode to skimming: On reading and our attention spans | Hacker News Reader

Ode to skimming: On reading and our attention spans

the-tls.co.uk

64 pointspseudolus25 comments

I skim because most non fiction books, especially those published in recent years, simply aren't worth reading word for word. Most books I've found can be condensed to a blog post at most.(Fiction can have similar issues. Epic fantasies are the worst offenders of this which sometimes have entire BOOKS of useless filler)

I also feel an internal pressure to make the absolute most out of my time spent doing activity x. If I'm reading a book then every page, every paragraph and every sentence should contribute something to broadening my understanding of whichever topic I'm reading about.

Perhaps this is all a sign of a fractured attention span, but I've found that since skimming books (as well as being able to simply put down a book that I'm not enjoying and not feeling any guilt about it) that I not only spend more time reading but seem to get more out of it.

> Perhaps this is all a sign of a fractured attention span

It is not, I think. It's a sign of the overall bad quality of most books, fiction and non fiction ones alike.

Your ability to skim through the bad ones pays off if you find one book worth reading, and read that one slowly and carefully.

    "Good morning," said the little prince.

    "Good morning," said the merchant.

    This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented
    to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week,
    and you would feel no need of anything to drink.

    "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

    "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the
     merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With
     these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."

    "And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

    "Anything you like..."

    "As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had
     fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at
     my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."

Books are contracted often by number of pages. The essential information would fit onto a fraction of pages but printing houses order a certain amount of pages because otherwise the price couldn't be justified.

I find (while not arguing you should do this too), I’ve given up attaching an expectation to reading.

This is because some of the most useful material I’ve read, I had to struggle though it and deal with the boredom. In hindsight, I really appreciate the fact I didn’t skim through it and persevered to grasp it all.

I find if open the book without looking for some kind of amazing or fun / exciting experience, it helps me to read more and feel less disappointed and bored if I’m not having a blast.

Sometimes I feel like reading a “good and enjoyable book” for fun, in that case, I would be disappointed if I wasn’t enjoying it and just find something else.

I skim because nearly everything is bloated with useless crud and the latest memetic faddery; because tech writers are always on the defensive vs pedants; because people with multiple arts degrees actually seem to get worse at writing, not better; because there are more things to see than ever, and less time available for any one of them.

How else are we supposed to manage the explore/exploit trade-off in the face of this galactic amount of information?

I absolutely recognize that I could have skimmed most non-fiction books I've read recently and taken away everything valuable all the same (especially since that's all that sticks for me 1, 3 or 5 years after reading it anyway).

I also find myself unable to do so. I feel as though I'm being lazy or dishonest in some way, despite knowing how silly that is.

I had to train myself to read way slower to appreciate good books. Then I had to train myself to read fast again to be able to keep reading less-good books.

Seriously.

Did anyone else find this article quite difficult to read? Perhaps ironically, I gave up by paragraph four.

Same here!

Yes.

Part of it is TLS's web design, particularly on mobile/tablet. I find multi-column layouts, especially where content fights with adverts and distractions (even just on-site elements) for attention, to be grossly suboptimal. Unfortunately, TLS fails both Outline.com and non-JS console browsers. I ended up copying text to a console pager to read it.

The style and content also contributes -- the review itself is ... eminantly skimmable.

Yes, and I only felt slightly guilty while skimming it! (a.k.a. looking for the point)

So many news articles start with "the big narrative"™. The authors seem like burgeoning/frustrated writers who are just practicing on us. I skim to get the details and toss all the narrative fluff. So many books are full of this fluff, you have to skim or its boring. The "respect" for the novel is a past time. When everyone can blog/cast/self publish people are not so impressed by the existence of a book. It is taken as a starting point, not a be-all-end-all.

This article is great.

Background is good.

Filler "human interest" narrative ... I can very much do without.

The balance can be hard to balance, at times. Most often it's not, and the obvious filler is obvious. And tedious.

Worst is when writers omit relevant background in favour of useless filler. All too common.

I rarely read long-form articles online these days. If it looks interesting, I'll print it. I read a lot of non-fiction, cover to cover, and always in physical form. I just enjoy sitting down with a book and marking it up. But also, I avoid recently published non-fiction because most of it reads like poorly edited blog posts. There are a few exceptions, but most of the new stuff doesn't draw me in the same way that older books do.

That said, I feel like because I do so much skimming online, just for work and whatnot, going from one physical page to the next while reading a book does something great for my brain. When I read offline, if I have selected the right book, I don't ever feel the need to skim. All of the time I spend reading offline feels like a compensatory reaction to the cognitive twitching that takes place in the browser all day.

Because we're talking about reading and non-fiction, here's a shameless plug for a non-fiction book club I'm putting together: https://strangers-club.com

Stop reading crap that forces you to skim. Start reading worthwhile things instead.

Do you read the documentation for every new tool/concept front-to-back before jumping into it? Probably not.

Documentation that bears reading is surprisingly hard to do well, so chances are you'll either find me a skimmer or I won't read it at all.

The concept here shares much (and probably pales next to) Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

If you're going through a lot of material, the ability to rapidly assess quality vs. unrewarding content, and then rapidly extract as much value from that quality content as possible, is extremely useful.

An HN perennial, FWIW: https://hn.algolia.com/?q="how%20to%20read%20a%20book" See particularly discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209446

And yes, there's the notion of reading simply for pleasure, in which case, for quality writing, time is its own reward.

To counter what most people seem to be saying here, I definitely skim most things I read because I have a short attention span. This is especially true of online materials, which I'm fine with, but I don't like when I'm reading in my spare time and find myself doing the same thing. I try to do the opposite of a speed reader and ensure I have some subvocalization. It helps me remember what I read.

There's too much information available to read everything carefully.

The article was too long so I just skimmed it.

Can't skim in german well

Why is that?

Words, sentences, and paragraphs tend to be far longer than in English, and all the action parts at the end are.

English tends to offer more readily graspable hooks to sense general content. German not as much.

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