April 11th 2025

If You Want to Learn How to Read, Learn How to Edit

Some strikethroughs on one of my recent works in progress.

Reading is an easy skill to pick up. What is harder to do, and also harder to define, is reading well.

“Reading well” implies that it is possible to read poorly – not by stumbling, not by stuttering, but by failing to achieve whatever one is trying to achieve by reading. Our goals as readers are so subjective that it may seem lacking in empathy to say that someone can read and yet simultaneously fail to do so.

Let's just temporarily agree to accept this premise: it is possible to read and still fail at reading, and so it is also possible to read well or at least to read better.

An early lesson that I had in reading, I got from my grandfather. Many times when I was a boy, he sat me down with a stack of his magazines, which he always read cover to cover. I remember these magazines well: National Review, The Atlantic, and Harper's. They became guideposts for me as I sought to understand the world and the means by which I could learn about it through indirect experience (i.e. by reading).

My grandfather George H. Gardner was someone who stood out in every room he entered. He served as a first lieutenant in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps during both World War II and the Korean War. He became politically active later in life, at one point serving as the president of his regional Republican club in Florida. In addition to being fantastically intelligent, he was fantastically charming. He had a very convincing way about him, and if he had sat me down with a copy of National Review by itself, he could have undoubtedly steered my thinking in the direction of its pages. Instead, he spent his time explaining to me that if I read something somewhere, I should then make the greatest effort to read something that was in opposition to it.

“Because my grandson, I think I'm right,” he would say to me, “but this other fella thinks he's right also.”

So began my lifelong struggle with information, its flimsiness and its sacredness all balled up into a dough, demanding that I cook it now, demanding as well that I first knead out all its lumps.

As I've continued to read and write throughout my life, I've noticed something: the practice of reading becomes, when approached with sufficient care, not unlike the practice of editing. As an editor, you have to allow yourself the freedom – more usefully perhaps, the inclination – to strike out any and every word that you see. With many first drafts, whether on a piece of scratch paper or a document in your word processor, that is indeed what you ought to do.

Isn't that demoralizing?

It can be! You put in all that work and it may still feel like you've gotten nowhere. After starting with a blank page, you don't want to end with a blank page or anything close to it. Likewise, if you have spent all that time reading, and you feel convinced, like you have a very good reason to think you're right, you don't want to go back and start over. It feels good to know things. It feels even better to know things with conviction!

Yet that is the process, because the product of reading isn't knowing things any more than the product of writing is having things on paper. In both cases, the product is indirect experience – your own, someone else's, shared, consumed. What matters is whether or not you can edit these indirect experiences well. (I know, there's that word “well” again.)

Back to our original agreement. Instead of saying just that there is such a thing as “reading well,” let's try to define it by replacing the word “well” with something else.

Instead of “well,” we could say “incredulously.” If we read incredulously, we are less likely to fall for the most blatant falsehoods.

Incredulity without reason is a little unfair, though. If you allow yourself to dismiss any information out of hand indiscriminately, you end up with something like an algorithm for maximizing your own biases.

We could swap out “well” for “accurately.” To read accurately is certainly to read more productively than to read inaccurately.

But this is like kicking responsibility for the definition down the road. Accuracy may not reveal itself until later on. It may be immeasurable while you're reading.

What about ruthlessly? “Ruthlessly” may work, with the right constraints.

If you are reading ruthlessly, then you are reading from a place made up of both faith and reason. You have faith that you can find good information and yet given how rare good information is, you keep in mind that you are unlikely to find it in this exact moment. Beset on all sides by lies, half-truths, obfuscations, straw men, argumenta ad metum, argumenta ad odium, and any other thing an impartial judge may strike with a gavel, you seek out the truth hopefully nonetheless.

If not the perfect definition of “reading well,” that sounds anyway like a half-decent one. Let's stick with that and move on to a different question.

How does one practice reading ruthlessly?

My grandfather was nudging me in the direction of such a practice when he leafed through his copies of National Review and The Atlantic with me. Here, I present another practice that I started doing in my teenage years. You can do it too, free of charge.

Step 1: Open any Wikipedia article, preferably one about history at least 200 years in the past. (Napoleon Bonaparte is a fine place to start. We want something that seems more distant from the present than, say, the election of Andrew Jackson.)

Step 2: When you have the article open, you can read through it or not. In either case, open the “Talk” tab at the top of the page. You will find there the means by which Wikipedia articles are edited.

Step 3: Read the edits. Read the challenges. Read the reasons that edits are being challenged. See the way that Wikipedia defines “verifiability” and “original research” – and why they require the first but forbid the second. Dig into the minutiae.

It's ruthless, isn't it?

I don't know if my grandfather ever used Wikipedia before he passed in 2006, but I like to think that if he could see it today, he would say to me, “See, this is what I was talking about. I think I'm right –”

And I'd finish: “But this other fella thinks he's right also.”