Name: The Astonishing Thing that Good Readers Do
Uploaded: 2025-08-10T12:36:59.000Z
Duration: 2 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

It's easy to think of reading as fundamentally a passive activity, right?

But that perception completely misinterprets what the act of reading entails.

Good readers' minds are far more active than their bodies appear.

Active reading is a little bit like being a catcher in baseball or a wicket-keeper in cricket.

The author is the pitcher or bowler and the book is the ball.

There's nothing passive about reading just like there's nothing passive about catching a baseball.

A passive catcher would do nothing and the ball would just hit him.

The catcher has to read where the ball is going to go and actually receive what is being thrown.

Active reading is like that but it's considerably harder because we're never 100% sure what the author is going to throw at us.

This is the truly astonishing thing about reading.

Through the act of reading, we get to capture something that we didn't know existed and maybe couldn't have even conceived of before reading.

And to that end, we're very concerned with the meanings that the author is trying to convey.

If we already knew what the author was going to throw at us, there wouldn't be much of a point to reading in the first place.

Or at least it wouldn't be the kind of situation where we are reading to learn something.

The kind of reading we're talking about here requires us to be somewhat ignorant of what the author is throwing at us and we have to figure out what it is that the author is sending.

Good readers are prepared to receive a variety of objects from an author in a variety of formats.

These might be frameworks, perspectives, theories, observations, procedures, methodologies, philosophies, logics, or something completely different.

That's why a good reader can learn more from reading one book than a bad reader can learn from reading a dozen.