Inspectional Reading

A very quick summary of what I found so valuable about Chapter Four of Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book."

"Systematic pre-reading" is getting a basic idea of the structure and main idea of the content of a book, in a very limited time. Adler gives some very practical ways for doing this(Look at the preface, table of contents, skim, read ends of chapters, end of book where author can’t resist trying to sum up what is so great or new about his book, etc.)

In some cases, a book is only worthy of being read in this way – you can get all that you need from it by using this systematic pre-reading.
In other cases, you may still want to read the book more closely, but the pre-reading has given you the basic outline of the book and makes it much easier to read faster, and to comprehend and retain.

(He also includes an entire section on the importance of giving very difficult books a superficial read before digging into them – then explains how to do this.)

In addition, he gives excellent how-tos on reading faster, training your eye to focus on sentences and even paragraphs rather than just words, using your hand to keep your eye from fixating or regressing.

Good reading means knowing when to read at different speeds – speeding up when the material is easily understood, slowing down when you need to digest. If you have taken the short time to pre-read any book, you will better know when to slow down and when to speed up. Even a very difficult book will have passages that can be -- and should be -- read through very quickly.

On the Adler Archive, there is an article called "Hard Reading Made Easy" that covers some of this same ground.