Stop, Slow Down, Go: Challenging the Myth of the Single-Speed Reader

Stop, Slow Down, Go: Challenging the Myth of the Single-Speed Reader

“I spent hours on the Gulliver’s Travels reading—yes, hours—and I still didn’t get through the Lilliput section!” my student, Sarah, bemoaned after class one morning. I asked her to walk me through her approach. “First, I read Jonathan Swift’s biography really carefully,” she said. “Like, line by line. Then I worked slowly through the historical context headnotes. By the time I reached the novel itself, my brain had run out of juice!” What conce…