Judging A Book By Its Cover
July 30, 2009
How many times have you heard, “don’t judge a book by its cover?”
Actually one of the first steps for improving your reading comprehension is to analyze the book’s cover as I found out during a television interview with Denis Leary on Comedy Central quite a few years ago.
Denis wanted me to read, “Lady Boss”, a new Jackie Collins novel at that time. The book was several hundred pages, and I needed to complete the entire book in under five minutes. I was told that Jackie Collins would be coming to test my retention and recall of her book when I was done.
Before the show began, the camera man asked me to go onto the set, and demonstrate how I read a book quickly so he could get a good shot of my hands moving during the interview. He didn’t want me to actually read the book, just scan the jacket cover.
The jacket of the book listed many of the key characters and their names: Mike, Moe, Murray, and Mel. At 80 pages per minute the names Moe, and Mel don’t really appear that differently. Instead I created a mental photograph of what each individual looked like. One looked like Tony Soprano, while another looked more like Brad Pitt.
When the time arrived for me to complete the entire book in five minutes, my brain was able to see pictures of each character at very high speed making it easy for me to get a perfect score on Jackie Collin’s comprehension test.
The lesson in this for you is simple. Before you begin reading a text, review the information on the cover and jacket making a mental photo of as much data as possible. This will prepare you to learn the entire text with far less effort. Your brain learns more efficiently when it has a map of the territory it is about to enter. Scanning your text’s cover is the first step in this process.
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