How to Read Like You Mean It

by Kyle Conway

This candid, concise volume explores how we can open ourselves up to the ideas and people that scare us by reading difficult texts. Author Kyle Conway argues that because we resist ideas we don’t understand, we must embrace confusion as a fundamental ingredient for meaning and exchange, whether between a reader and a text or between two people. Through evaluating the paradox of miscommunication, Conway posits that it’s uncertainty that results in deeper understanding and proposes strategies for reading that will allow individuals to give up the illusion of certainty. In elegant and compelling prose, How to Read Like You Mean It introduces readers to the idea that it is through ambiguity that we can gain access to new, profound worlds—those of texts and other people.

168 pages, Paperback

Published September 29, 2023

Reviews

[gabby · Rating 4 out of 5]

for cmn 5100.

i did find this quite abstract but i was glad to see much of my class agreed lol.

the main argument of the book discusses the idea of getting "lost" in texts to help form understanding. quite reassuring because much of the texts we've read so far have been.. difficult. in general the argument that using confusion as a building block for understanding is one that i've not thought of previously but one that was fun to explore!

[Alberta Views Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kyle Conway’s How to Read Like You Mean It addresses how students are taught to listen or read—or both—because, based on students’ own accounts and those of their teachers, they are not well instructed in either. The problem is far bigger than the classroom, for our world cannot exist without our ability to communicate—meaning to make and sustain a community, and thus each other, thus, ourselves. When we do not read well, we are not good at an essential part of life. So while the focus is on reading the kind of “dense and difficult texts” that university students need to know how to learn from—and be shaped by—this book is also part of Conway’s ongoing thinking about how we talk to each other across the polarizing divides that currently entrap us.

An associate professor of communications at the University of Ottawa, and author of three previous books on communication and translation, Conway here offers two answers to the question of why undergraduate students find the “dense texts” not just difficult (they are) but, far too often, inscrutable. The first is that when difficult texts are supposed to be interpreted in terms of single correct meanings, university learning becomes little more than a complicated quiz show on examinable content. This approach misrepresents the act of reading, thus cutting off the complex and mind-broadening relationship that the reader looks for and the writer wants to offer.

Review by Richard Harrison
Full review at https://albertaviews.ca/how-to-read-l...