Learning from a longtime English professor how to read with more clarity, insight, and truth.
After twenty-one years of experience as an English professor in Michigan, Thomas C. Foster turned his attention to writing—to teach readers how to build on their reading skills with the depth of a professor, no matter what the content or genre. Even though some tips might be universal, the differences are significant enough to require over three books to help engage and educate readers.
In How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor, Foster urges readers to walk the fine line between skepticism and unconditional belief. Readers must remember that all authors have biases, and not all of a text’s sources can be the guaranteed truth, but believing nothing gets nothing. Readers should carefully consider an author’s background before deciding to read their work. Key aspects of research include the author’s credentials, the professionalism demonstrated in their writing, the quality of the background sources used, the honesty with which the material is evaluated, and the fairness and logic of the conclusions drawn from those sources. In the book, Foster emphasizes and reassures readers about his credentials.
When questioning an author’s argument, a reader is essentially questioning its pinning: whether it is based on emotion or logic, whether it relies on preexisting biases (especially important online and in politics), how it is constructed in its internal support and connection, how it chooses the points for its argument, and whether it relies on rhetoric and/or inflammatory language. Data also needs to be evaluated for its completeness, its applications, the veracity of its analogies, and its context and sources.
Some Internet-specific communication forms Foster lists as potential sources are blogs, social media, webpages, and discussion boards, in addition to online reviews, videos, and how-to/help. Evaluating internet sources can be challenging due to the abundance of information, including misinformation, available on easily accessible platforms with minimal editing. Readers must serve as the editors, or the “gatekeepers” of information to filter out the nonsense and the babble, constantly using the same thinking that goes into verifying texts and other sources. Treating others’ online opinions as facts makes it easy for readers to succumb to mob mentality through pathos-based pseudo-arguments.
And, whether online or in print, that is what Foster wants to teach his readers to avoid while reading nonfiction. Fiction, however, is a different story—and one that begins with his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor.
According to Foster, a “professional” reader is distinguished from a “regular” reader through three main items: memory, symbol, and pattern. Professors/professionals use good and honed memories to notice themes, think symbolically, look out for any and all signifying metaphors/analogies, and recognize patterns throughout writing that stretch beyond plot. Beginning readers lose themselves in detail, while veteran readers absorb detail to help them make beyond-the-surface observations and judgments.
A major distinction needs to be drawn between literature scholars and literature readers in a few regards, one of them being how they judge texts. From a scholarly perspective, it is both acceptable and conventional to consider the author’s background and the context in which the work was created. However, readers should primarily focus on the novel itself and analyze the text using the framework that the text provides. When a casual reader does not have the background, the professional reader should not allow themselves access to it. The essential ground rules when reading to analyze, as Foster lays out, are simple: block out outside sources, do not read ahead, record results thoughtfully, use interpretive strategies (gathered from any source), and read carefully.
What readers need to learn to do when reading literature like a professor is read with a metaphorical third eye, an eye that has the perspective of a reader from the time of the work’s origin. An objective eye that sees into the past with extrasensory perception. But this eye must not blind readers from reading as themselves, and while listening to others’ viewpoints, have their own well-thought opinions they’re able to assert. Reading like a professor should not interfere with reading like a person—after all, professors are people too. The difference comes in experience and learning the patterns and conventions of literature, learning the “language of reading.”
However, Foster is not finished examining fiction; in How to Read Novels Like a Professor, he validates and analyzes the novel as a specific fiction medium. (As Foster reminds readers early on, novels are literature, but not all literature are novels.)
The first sentence of a novel grabs readers’ interest, while the first page allows the author to show their hand in what readers can expect from a novel: its style, its tone, the perspective and narrative presence, themes and motifs, and more. From there on out, the readers help fill in the gaps the authors leave out to make a story about a world and its characters and people. The novel’s nature involves an exchange with its reader: as the characters enact their stories, readers enact and live with them, and good stories live on after the last page.
The many genres available for novels provide plenty of opportunities for entertainment and learning. Not all novels aspire to universal themes, and the novel is not meant to be a carrier for a direct education on morality, but the lesson at the heart of a novel, mixed within the meanings of human behavior, is simple: the affirmation of personal value. This plays a major role in why all novels are connected: not merely because of how works play and build off of one another in the textual literary/novel canon, but because of how the different pieces of the human experience connect and converse with one another. The objective “quality” of written material—whether literature, nonfiction, or novels—will always be hard to define, and one’s own skill and quality in reading are equally difficult to define. But the key elements for a reader include enthusiasm and education—the latter of which Thomas C. Foster is more than able to provide throughout his own written material. Even those who do not wish to teach others can teach themselves how to better learn from books and sources around them. There’s a professor waiting at the ready for anybody who is ready to learn.
By Grace Dietz
Grace is an Editorial Assistant at Technica Editorial
