Organising sermon preparationPosts in this series
If you kept up with my posts about commentaries, you may think that I'm either lying about how much I read for sermon preparation or I do nothing but read each week.
So I thought I should make a comment or two about reading speeds, particularly when it comes to commentaries.
Mortimer Adler has wonderful advice in his classic, 'How to read a book' (available from Amazon), on reading speeds:
Let it be understood at once that we are wholly in favor of the proposition that most people ought to be able to read faster than they do. Too often, there are things we have to read that are not really worth spending a lot of time reading; if we cannot read them quickly, it will be a terrible waste of time.
It is true enough that many people read some things too slowly, and that they ought to read them faster. But many people also read some things too fast, and they ought to read those things more slowly. A good speed reading course should therefore teach you to read at many different speeds, not just one speed that is faster than anything you can manage now. It should enable you to vary your rate of reading in accordance with the nature and complexity of the material.
Our point is really very simple. Many books are hardly worth even skimming; some should be read quickly; and a few should be read at a rate, usually quite slow, that allows for complete comprehension. It is wasteful to read a book slowly that deserves only a fast reading; speed reading skills can help you solve that problem. But this is only one reading problem. The obstacles that stand in the way of comprehension of a difficult book are not ordinarily, and perhaps never primarily, physiological or psychological. They arise because the reader simply does not know what to do when approaching a difficult-and rewarding-book. He does not know the rules of reading; he does not know how to marshal his intellectual resources for the task. No matter how quickly he reads, he will be no better off if, as is too often true, he does not know what he is looking for and does not know when he has found it.
With regard to rates of reading, then, the ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read at different speeds-and to know when the different speeds are appropriate...Every book, no matter how difficult, contains interstitial material that can be and should be read quickly; and every good book also contains matter that is difficult and should be read very slowly. ' (Page 39)
Thus I would advise with Adler that not all commentaries should be read at the same speed, and not all parts of a commentary should be read at the same speed.
Adler says that the way to read is to know what you are looking for - and so when you read commentaries you should be looking for answers to questions you have not yet solved and fresh ideas.
So on the first day that I read commentaries, I read the best ones first and I read slowly. This is because almost everything I read initially is helping answer my questions or is providing fresh ideas. But as I move from one commentary to another, I begin to read more and more quickly as most of what I am reading is already familiar to me from my earlier slower reading. But if I hit a patch of freshness or a discussion of a question I still have, I slow down. And if I then hit familiar ground again, even within the same commentary, I speed up. Thus by the time you reach your last commentaries you'll be reading very quickly indeed as most of what you're reading is not what you're looking for.
Also, when reading sermons on your text I would advise moving quickly. What you are looking for is big ideas and sermon structures, not so much the details of the sermons (unless it is really good and starts to become personally edifying).
Finally, I would also suggest skipping Bible references, particularly when they are given as full Bible text. Of course the exception would be if you're unfamiliar with the idea and surprised that Scripture says what the author claims.
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