First of all, you might reason that reading is a race: The person who covers the most distance wins. But here’s the problem with this reasoning: The skills required to skim a tabloid differs from those needed to decode a dense research paper. How fast did your eyes moved? Did you understand what was written? […]

On Tuesday morning, you remember you committed to a book review due Friday. You haven’t cracked open the book yet so you go wide-eyed in a panic. How many minutes will it take? You look at your computer cursor and guess: twelve hundred words typed should of took about two or three hours. But that’s […]

When you’re trying to read a novel over the weekend, you get through most of it just fine, until you hit a paragraph that tires out your brain and you spend an hour stuck there. It’s not a question of willpower: it’s a reluctance to accept that reading should be treated as a project with […]

How many times have you said yes to an author-friend who asked if you’d read through a chapter of their manuscript this week? Sure! But then you realize the file is longer than you thought. The draft is a bit rough. You are about to spend your free weekend making margin notes that you didn’t […]