Not long ago, one of my professors asked our class to read in a completely different way: photo reading. To be honest, I was a little skeptical. Spending 33 minutes read a book didn't seem very conducive to comprehension. But, I went ahead and followed a process similar to photo reading.

To quickly summarize, I relaxed and focused my attention on the book in my hands. Next, I flipped through the book quickly, a second or two a page. Each page, I would just look for things that stood out as meaningful or important. These things I would star or put a vertical line next to and move on.

When I finished reading the assigned material in this manner, I considered what I was most interested in. Quickly finding the passages I had marked, I skimmed them again, this time in light of the sense the book gave me as a whole. I chose three pages to focus on and wrote a question pertaining to each of them to bring to class.

This process was a little uncomfortable at first. Then I recalled Mortimer Adler's How To Read A Book, in which he outlines four types of reading, in which he describes a type of reading called inspectional reading. In this way of reading, a person quickly glances a each page to reach a basic understanding of the whole. Recalling Adler comforted me and I was able to cast aside the guilt I experienced from having to move so quickly through the text.

Surprisingly, I found I was able to get a good sense of the text, for having only spent 33 minutes reading it. I found myself attracted to the author's core statements and definitions, as well as a few key examples. While I will still read many of my books in full, I found that this is an effective reading tool.