Reading as a Writer: The Great Adventure (part two)

by Jan Drexler



In their classic work, How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren spent more than four hundred pages instructing the dedicated student in four levels of reading. The work is comprehensive and fabulous. If you’ve never read this book, I recommend it.

The book also goes far beyond our purposes here, so with apologies to Adler and Van Doren, here is my own “How to Read a Book for Writers.”

In last month’s post, we talked about why we should read and what we should read. You can read that post here.

How we read can be even more important than Why or What we read. We want to learn how to write – how to tell a story other people will want to read – and the way we read can help us do that. According to Adler and Van Doren, there are four levels of reading:

1) Elementary Reading
2) Inspectional Reading
3) Analytical Reading
4) Syntopical Reading

Now let’s apply these levels to the writer. 


Elementary reading is what all of us do when we pick up a book to read for pleasure. We enjoy the story, get lost in the narrative, thrill in the settings, then put the book down with a sigh of pleasure at the end. 
Once you've learned the mechanics of reading, Elementary reading is reading for enjoyment.