We all enjoy reading stories, but have you ever wondered how the stories are put together? What makes us believe in the characters? How far can we trust the narrator? Every story has four keys: plot, characterization, dialogue, and setting. Do you know how characters, thoughts, and motives are communicated to the reader?
We’ll explore how a particular atmosphere can be created depending on where a story is set, and you’ll learn how to spot when a narrator is unreliable. Also, you’ll learn how to read the story more incisively, drawing on various examples and classic texts.
How To Read Story Books?
Reading a story gives an extraordinary opportunity to get an insight into the thinking and believing. It is a way of understanding and learning in a new way that adds thrill and excitement to life. There are some basic rules and techniques to read and understand storybooks properly. Let’s discover the 5 tips!
1. Goals of reading
You can read a storybook for information, understanding, and learning. Pulling information out of a text is a prerequisite for learning.
You can’t understand the contents of a book without at least getting the information it’s trying to convey. However, being informed should not be your ultimate goal. Your goal should be reading for the sake of increased understanding. Intermediate reading skills are better used to take information out of books. But the real reading techniques it may take years to develop and reinforce properly are the ones that allow you to understand what you’re reading.
2. Learn reading levels
There are four reading levels. If you want to learn the next reading level, you need to master your current one.
Elementary reading: The first level is elementary reading. Here you are concerned with the language. What does a sentence say? Can you identify the words themselves and perceive what they mean? It is how everyone starts reading but doesn’t help you understand the book’s contents or text you are analyzing.
Inspection reading: When you read at this level, your goal is to examine the book’s surface. That’s why this level is also identified as skimming or prereading with inspection or reading. You should understand what kind of book it is and its mind structure.
Analytical reading: It is a more complex and systematic reading. It should be thorough and complete the best reading you can do. Analytical reading means the reader must ask many organized questions about the book’s topic. Analytically reading a book is chewing and digesting it. It’s the fundamental reading process. Analytical reading should not be used for entertainment or passively obtaining information. It should be used to work on the information.
Syntopical reading: It can also be called comparative reading. The reader reads many books to interpret one of its comparisons of texts and analyze the subject in any specific book. Mastering is the third level of reading analytical reading.
3. Skimming
Sometimes skimming has a weird connotation where it’s considered an inferior reading method, but it’s not. It should always precede analytical reading. Most of all, it’s a completely valid reading technique you should implement when you’re short of time.
Find the chapters that are fundamental to the book’s main arguments. If these chapters have summary statements in their opening or closing pages, you should be reading those statements carefully. You should always look for the main subject’s signs, a sense of purpose, and the author’s angle.
4. Asking questions
Analytical reading requires the reader to ask the right questions and do so throughout the entire book. But the essence of active reading is asking basic questions about the book you’re reading. What is being said in detail, and how is the book whole or part? While that is part of the difficulty of reading? You need to answer the questions you ask. Asking these questions is part of your duty as a story reader.
This is where the difference lies between the demanding and the undermanning reader. These also apply to anything worth reading, from a book to an article. While you are thinking about these questions and seeking the right answers in the process is part of the difficulty of knowing how to read. A demanding reader can use some methods to make a book their own by picking an author’s work.
5. Discover the story
There are many different ways to do this. One of the techniques is intelligently marking or annotating your book. Analytical reading has rules and a structure. Picking up a book and reading it from page one doesn’t cut it for analytical reading. If you do that, you’re not truly grasping the book’s contents. It doesn’t necessarily apply to books that you read for entertainment. Books for entertainment can be read without going into full analytical reading mode, although they have their own rules.
- You need to know the genre of the book as well as the setting and type of content.
It can be done by observing, reading, or skimming. You read a title subtitle, Table of Contents, glance at the pretty face and dust jacket, and you probably get a general idea of what that particular title is all about.
- You should state the unity of the whole book in a single sentence or at most a few sentences.
It would be best to say what the whole book is about as briefly as possible. It doesn’t cover the categories you should be seeking in rule number one. Instead, you should describe the book’s purpose in a sentence. You need to discover its theme or main point.
- Understanding how the major parts of the book are organized into a whole.
Like a good house, a good book is an orderly arrangement of parts in each major part with a certain amount of independence. You can analyze a major theory that unifies the entire book. You need to understand how each argument contributes to the theory and helps build it from scratch.
Each argument will tie to other arguments, but it will also be sufficiently independent to be considered an argument. You can do this by learning how to outline a book and cover the skeleton that the book conceals.
- Find out the author’s problems.
To comply with this rule, you should be able to state the main question that the book tries to answer, and you should be able to state the subordinate questions in case the main question is complex or has a lot of parts. These questions can be theoretical or practical that something exists:
What kind of thing is it? What purpose does it serve? Then what things must do to gain a specific objective? What conditions would it be better to do this rather than that?
There are thousands of questions an author can ask and answer throughout the book, but there will always be theoretical or practical.
It’s your job as a reader to understand which questions apply to the content of certain books and which questions don’t. There’s much more to cover on meaning, terms, and the author’s message.
Read more:
5 Tips To Read Historical Fiction
10 Tips To Read Classical Books
5 Tips To Start Reading Mythology
5 Tips To Read A Book You Hate
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