Misreadings.

Tonya has some thoughts on blog comments generally and specifically on my experience with them. She notes that the main problem she's had with comments has been readers misreading her (including not getting the humor). That reminds me of something I had wanted to say about the comments. It is actually something that bothers me as much as the rudeness and the use of personal attacks instead of substantive arguments. It is how badly people read!

This is a matter I notice as a law professor too. Being a lawprof offers many occasions for seeing how poorly people read. Even in a class of well-qualified students (something I feel sure of based on my Admissions Committee work), where the students have a strong motivation to read the cases carefully in preparation for class, I am continually surprised by how little of what is written is understood. Even before going more deeply into the context of the cases and the motivations of the decisionmakers, students find it hard simply to restate the reasoning laid down in the text. Even when sentences are read out loud in class, many students cannot then paraphrase what the text means. On exams, I beg the students to answer the question asked. I write several times in the text of the exam: "Remember, you can only receive credit for answering the question asked." Yet many students seem to read the question and derive only a general idea of the area addressed and launch into a flow of verbiage that is in no way aimed at the precise question.

The experience with comments on this blog has reinforced my belief that people are not reading with a clear head. I don't think I'm encountering unintelligent people (especially in the case of the students). I think people read with their emotions: they know what they want to see or what they are afraid someone might be saying, and their emotions take over the processing of the words they are looking at. Emotion is a necessary component of human thought, and we could not do without it, but part of education must be controlling the freeform flow of emotion long enough to see the words on the page. I realize every word means what it means because it is absorbed into an individual person's subjective mind, but people need to discipline themselves a bit to fend off the misreadings and misunderstanding that constantly pull us away from the mind of the writer we read to encounter.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt frustrated by how slowly I read compared to other people. I have though known a few other people, people I respect very much, who share the same frustration. Yet I also know the feeling of just glancing at an article and believing I know what it says. I know we can't spend our lives ponderously laboring over other people's sentences. But we need to be aware of when we are really reading without risk of misunderstanding and when we are being reckless. Certainly, there are times when we need to read accurately, such as when reading an exam question or before attacking something someone has written. Learning to read and reading well are a constant struggle. The author's ideas don't just pop into your head when you look at the words. A large part of what appears in your head is your own thinking, and of course, the main reason to read is to develop your own mind. You want to cause thoughts of your own. One reason for reading slowly is to stop and think (or blog about) your own thoughts. But you're misreading if you can't tell the difference between your own thoughts and the writer's.

UPDATE: Chad Oldfather of Oklahoma City University School of Law emails:

Even though I never got around to leaving a comment (I started to one time, and somehow via the registration process ended up instead with a blog of my own that I’ll probably never use), I’m sad to see your comment function go. ...

I couldn’t agree more with your Misreading post.  I’m also continually struck by the number of times I encounter suggestions that what appear to be epic scholarly debates might have at least something to do with mutual misreading.  One example is Posner-Dworkin.  I’ve seen both of them accused of failing to understand what the other has written.  I see this sort of thing all the time.  Then it makes me wonder, like you: Is this how it is that everybody else seems to be able to read so fast?  And then: Is this why so much scholarly debate often appears less like debate and more like people talking past one another?