This Pre-reading Process Saves My Time When Reading Nonfiction Books

I was terrible at reading nonfiction, which includes technical, business, and self-help books. I bought plenty of such books, hoping someday I would eventually read them all. Occasionally, I pulled one of them from the shelf and read several pages of the first chapter. After a while, I faced an unknown word or a concept. I googled for its meaning, and soon I escaped from reading the book to check emails, Facebook, news, or something else that was rather entertaining. More than a year ago, I began experimenting with several techniques to improve my focus during reading and get better at figuring out key points in a book. I found pre-reading very helpful to become a better reader. One can easily learn and perform pre-reading activities and quickly elevate their reading abilities.

My Pre-reading Steps

My pre-reading process includes the following steps. I adapted steps 2, 3, and 4 from How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

1. Write my reading goal and pre-reading questions
2. Identify the book’s topic, scope, and big ideas
3. Study the organization of contents
4. Read several important passages
5. Write a pre-reading summary

Pareto’s Principle In Non-Fiction Reading

Pareto’s 80/20 principle applies to nonfiction materials as well. Author’s big ideas, or what we are interested in a book, we can usually find them in smaller parts of the book. I now use pre-reading to find quickly in a book the parts that I am interested in. 3 weeks ago, I wanted to read Working Backwords, by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, which explains a method Amazon devised for approving new product proposals. I wanted to extract key ideas from the Working Backwards quickly and possibly use them to improve a product proposal I was preparing. I used pre-reading to get quickly an overview and structure of the book, and to identify 23 pages, out of 262 pages, that had the ideas that I could immediately apply in my proposal. Next, I read only these 23 pages from the book, understood them deeply, and used them to prepare a better product proposal. Pre-reading helped me cut down my reading to only 10% of the pages that had the knowledge I was interested in and could apply immediately.

A Demonstration of My Pre-reading Process

For taking you through my pre-reading steps, I chose the following book, which I bought recently and haven’t checked out yet.

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, written by Scott Young

image source: goodreads.com

Step 1: Write my reading goal and pre-reading questions

I want to read this book as I expect to pick up from it a few new learning techniques I don’t know already. The following is a list of my pre-reading questions in the book. As I pre-read the book, I will ask these questions and try to find their answers.

1. What are the specific learning problems the author promises to solve?
2. What is the author’s unique approach to solving these learning problems?
3. How credible is the author?
4. How has the author organized the contents?
5. Which chapters explain the author’s solution?
6. What are the key concepts that underlie the author’s problem and solution?

Step 2: Identify the book’s topic, scope, and big ideas

A single book can’t cover all aspects of learning, which is a broad topic. So, the author of this book must have picked a narrower scope, e.g., a problem, from the vast field of learning. In step 1, I try to figure out this book’s scope. I search for clues on the book’s focus on the following elements:

• Title,
• Subtitle
• Front and back flaps
• Publisher’s blurb on the dust jacket
• Foreword / preface / introduction, if available

When scanning the title and the subtitle of Ultralearning, the following phrases I made bold caught my attention.
Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

From reading the dust cover and the flaps, I found further clues as highlighted below:

• “Read Ultralearning for specific directions on structuring and absorbing complex topics…”
• “Ultralearning offers nine principles to master hard skills quickly.”

From the above phrases, it appears that the book focuses on the challenge of learning new skills, specifically difficult ones. It promises to help address this challenge by teaching a learning framework of 9 principles.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habit, wrote the foreword for this book and commented on some principles of Ultralearning, which I am expressing below in my words.

• Metalearning: learn from the experts, follow their paths to expertise.
• Directness: “the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn.”
• Focus: immerse yourself in practicing the skill you want to master.
• Drill: divide and conquer — break down performance of skill, which you want to learn, into smaller tasks. Acquire excellence in performing each task.

From reading the forward, I gain a high-level understanding of the Ultralearning framework and some of its principles.

Step 3: Study the organization of contents

Now, I will study the table of contents of the book to figure out how the author has structured the contents in different chapters. I read the chapter titles and guess what’s in each chapter. I can relate some of what I already read in the Forward to a few chapters in this table — the chapters on Metalearning, Focus, Directness, and Drill. Some authors divide the chapters into multiple parts and give each part a name. Even though this author hasn’t created such divisions, it appears there are logical groups of chapters in this table of contents. Probably, chapters 1 and 2 will motivate the readers to become an ultralearner, and chapter 3 will summarize the ultralearning framework. Chapters 3 through 12 will explain the nine principles of ultralearning. Chapter 13 probably asks the reader to pick a project to apply the ultralearning skills. The final chapter’s content is unclear from its title.

After spending just a few minutes in examining the table of contents, I got a decent grasp of the book’s structure and the author’s plan on delivering on his promise.

source: amazon.ca

Step 4: Read several important passages

So far I stayed at the surface of the book — its covers, front matters, and the table of contents. Now, I will dip my fingers in the water, by reading sample passages on important concepts in the book. To identify important concepts, I will look up the index for the most frequent index entries. In the index, the following keywords have the most page counts:
ultralearning
directness
drill
experimentation
feedback
focus
Intuition
learning
metalearning
retention
retrieval

From my study of the table of contents in step 3, I recognize that most of these keywords are the principles of ultralearning. First, I want to grasp an overview of the ultralearning framework. Among the index entries under ultralearning, the process of ultralearning is linked to pages 40–50. So, I skim these pages and see that pages 47–49 have an overview of ultralearning. I read these 3 pages carefully. Next, I scan the list of keywords for the ultralearning principles and choose two keywords that I am least familiar with: Metalearing and Intuition. I examine the index entries under each of these two keywords, pick several entries, and read the passages and pages they referenced.

From completing this step, I got a superficial understanding of the ultralearning framework and its nine principles. This is sufficient for me to create a mental hook for this book and understand what it offers.

Step 5: Write a pre-reading summary

Steps 4 concludes the actual pre-reading of the book. Now, it’s time for me to revisit my list of pre-reading questions and write their answers in a summary note. At anytime in the future, I can read just this summary note to recall what I had figured out from this pre-reading session. Here’s my summary on Ultralearning:

Ultralearning is a how to book about developing new skills. The author teaches nine principles to speed up the acquisition of new skills. Some of these principles are metalearning, focus, experimentation, and feedback. Learning by doing is the overarching idea that ties all these principles. The book has 14 chapters. The first three chapters motivate the readers to become ultralearners and introduce the ultralearning framework and its nine principles. Next nine chapters expand these principles. From skimming some of these chapters on principles, I noticed that, while explaining these principles, the author drew up stories of famous people from different fields. For example, I saw references to famous Physicist Richard Feynman. In a book ending chapter, the author invited the readers to apply the ultralearning framework in a next learning project. Barbara Oakley, Cal Newport and James Clear — each one is a best selling author — have highly praised this book. I have read their books and admire them. So, their positive comments on Ultralearing encourage me to read this book.

Decide my next step

For me, this book is relevant as, for the past 1.5 years, I have been experimenting with different techniques to become a better learner. However, I will probably not read this book cover to cover, as I am already applying some of the learning principles the book teaches. For example, I am already trying to focus, experimenting, and retrieval strategies that I learned from a few other books on learning. When I am ready to pick up this book for a serious reading, I will read the following chapters first:

• Chapter 3: How to Become an Ultralearner
  From pre-reading, I saw this chapter summarize the ultralearning framework. So, it will be a good launching point for reading this book.
• Chapter 4: Principle 1 Metalearning
  I am not using this principle today, at least not continuously. So, I want to learn and try this principle in my learning.
• Chapter 11: Principle 8 Intuition
  I will read this chapter as I want to get better at applying intuition to learn anything.

After I have learned and tried metalearning and intuition principles, I will decide if I want to read rest of the chapters on the reimagining principles.

Contributions

In this article, I have shared a series of questions I ask while pre-reading a nonfiction book. Using a nonfiction book as an example, I have showed how I pre-read a book to extract from it the answers to my pre-reading questions.