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My name is Steve, and today's talk is called "I Read It But Don't Get It" or "Tackling Technical Texts." As I start off, I'd love to know how you guys are doing, so if I could get a visual thumbs up if you're feeling good, thumbs in the middle if you're okay, and thumbs down if you're having a terrible day.
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I see almost all thumbs up, which is super impressive. It sounds like everybody's having a good morning.
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To give a little bit of background on myself, I’m a software engineer, but I used to teach middle school and high school English for ten years. Like many of us, I transitioned into software engineering by going through a coding bootcamp. Even though I was told this many times, I'm shocked by how much of my personal experience as a teacher overlaps with my experience as a software engineer.
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That's what I want to get into today. To be clear about what I want you to get out of this talk, I think there should be deliverables, or things you can do the next day as professionals. My goal is for you to leave today's talk with three more tools or questions—no more and no less. If you leave having three questions to ask yourself while reading a challenging text, then I will consider this a success for both myself and for you.
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You might be wondering what I mean when I say a technical text. While this is not an actual definition, it’s one I made up that will be useful so we all have the same foundation for today's talk. When I talk about a technical text, I'm referring to something related to the writing of code, the development of code systems, code architecture, or any kind of theories about that work.
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To be even more specific, that is the technical part of it. When I mention a text today, I mean a book-length text written in chapter format—very traditional. The reason I want to emphasize that I am talking about books is because while texts could include a tweet, blog post, TED talk, or conference presentation, today I want to be very literal about referring to a chapter book.
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If you're wondering what sorts of technical texts I'm referring to, consider a book that has a picture of space on the cover, an abstract 3D art piece, or most popularly, a 19th-century illustration of a bird. These are signs that you're about to read a technical text.
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But why should we even read these? Why am I discussing how we might tackle them? Someone might read these books because they're very commonly recommended. I know when I started as a software developer, people said, "You should read Clean Code." These texts are often guidebooks given to early career and mid-career engineers or developers, and even those who have been in the field for 10 or 20 years revisit them.
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Another reason I think these traditional books are useful is that they present longer arguments for particular approaches to code. You can read a tweet that tells you something interesting, but that argument is incredibly compact. The amount of information received in a tweet is minimal. By reading a book-length text, you're exposed to a different kind of evidence and argument, which lends itself to different kinds of learning.
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Now I want to lay out a roadmap for where we're going today. We've established what a technical text is, why we should read them, and why they might be useful. I want to start by telling you about how I discovered that I was a disengaged reader—that I was not engaged in reading technical texts. Then we will discuss what it means to be an engaged reader: what does an engaged reader do?
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Finally, I want to show you practical examples of how I put the theory from the second part into practice. For some of you who are itching to know what you can actually do to be more engaged with the text, I will share the literal transcription of what I did. Last of all, I want us to think about how we can extend these ideas beyond just reading technical texts.
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I'll start by telling you a story about a student I had; let’s call him Jason, a seventh grader.
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During independent reading time, he got to choose his book and read it. Every time I looked over during this time, he was nodding his head, his eyes were moving, and he was turning the pages at an appropriate rate. He indicated physically that he was reading a book; he looked engaged. As the teacher, I might ask, "Hey, Jason, how's your book?" because I had read that book.
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Jason replies, "Good." Now, I can’t tell if this is an actual review of the book or if he’s just being a monosyllabic teen, so I ask some follow-up questions: "What do you wonder about the main character? What do you think about her?" He replies, "She’s nice." That sets off alarm bells in my head because the main character is a serial killer—she’s not very nice.
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So while he's physically reading the words, he's not really making any sense out of the book. Fast forward ten years: now Steve, the teacher, has a better haircut and is a software engineer. At work, they’re reading Practical Object-Oriented Design, and he’s super excited. He’s convinced he’ll finally gain the technical knowledge he needs to understand some of the concepts missing from his coding bootcamp.
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They go to the first meeting, and a really wise engineer asks, "What did you think of that second chapter?" Steve responds, "That’s good." When she follows up, "What do you think she was ignoring in the second chapter, though? It felt like there were a lot of holes in her argument," Steve just responds, "Sounded good." This should set off alarm bells in your head because Steve does not sound engaged.
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The shocking part is that this kid loved reading. I read all the time as a kid and never had to work hard to make sense of texts; fiction was easy for me, and a lot of nonfiction was too. However, I was really struggling to engage with technical texts. That's when I decided to think about how I dealt with a student like Jason—how do I teach a seventh grader to engage more with a book—and how can I, as a 39-year-old, implement those practices with a really dense, challenging text.
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Now, let’s talk about what it means when I say Jason wasn’t engaged with his fictional text, and I was not engaged with my technical text. What does it mean for a reader to be engaged with a book? I want to first start with some baseline assumptions so you know where I’m coming from theoretically.
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First of all, reading is a skill. Note that the word "do" is italicized; it’s an active verb. Many people think reading is simply opening a book and letting words and ideas flow into their heads. However, meaningful reading and making sense of a text is an active skill that requires actual thinking. You need to be aware of your thinking, which we’ll get into. This means reading is a skill that you have to practice and often learn.
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Second, this might be obvious, but it’s worth saying: just because you read well doesn’t mean you’re smart. Conversely, importantly, just because you're really smart doesn’t make you a good reader. I like to think of myself as somewhat smart, but I struggled to be a good reader of technical texts. This meant I needed to supplement my reading with new skills in order to make meaning out of technical books.
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Lastly, texts are not documents set in stone. This comes from my undergraduate degree as an English major, where you learn that texts are flawed and biased. We should think of any book we read as a reflection of one person's point of view, presenting their experience and argument with the evidence available. The richness that comes from a text arises from our dialogue with the author. We shouldn't take the books literally or as 100% true; instead, it’s for us to interrogate and engage with.
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Next, let’s talk about what an engaged reader does. An engaged reader has an active mind while reading about the text itself. I emphasize "about the text itself" because we have all had experiences of having an active mind while reading, but we were not thinking about the reading. We might be thinking about having enough lemons for a recipe or a project we need to respond to. Instead, an engaged reader focuses their thoughts on the book.
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Importantly, engaged readers are aware of what those thoughts are. This sounds a little bit like meditation; in meditation, it's not that you don't have thoughts, it's that you are aware of them. You can notice and label your thoughts. Engaged readers can do the same thing.
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I’m going to create five very crude, arbitrary categories to describe the actions of engaged readers. I say they are arbitrary because all things in life are arbitrary, and there will be similarities. However, what I want to argue is that an engaged reader previews the text, connects with it while reading, questions the text, reviews it, and applies what they’ve learned from it.
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An important note here is that previewing happens before you start reading the bulk of the book, while applying happens after you've read the book. Most of what you'll be doing as an engaged reader of a technical text happens during the reading—that's where connecting, questioning, and reviewing come in.
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So, what does this look like? Let’s label these five verbs. One, previewing. Some of us are really good at this already, while others may not be aware of the tools available to us. A good reader will pick up the book and start to get acquainted with it. You read the back of it to see what it's about, who the author is, and where they work. You might skim through chapters or sections of the book to orient yourself.
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This is like when you're going on a trip and you check the overview in Google Maps or similar software before diving into the directions. You want a big picture of where you are going.
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Next, while you are reading, you make connections. This is familiar to anyone who has taught in middle or high school. An engaged reader can make connections in three ways: text to self, text to text, and text to the outside world. For example, as a software developer, you might read a passage and think about how it relates to code you've written. You could also recall a blog post or a previous book that covered a similar idea.
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Last but not least, you connect it to things you see outside. This is closely related to text to self, as we live in the same world, so it may be easy to make those kinds of connections.
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Another important action is questioning. You can ask questions about the text, both to clarify what the author is stating and to interrogate their point of view. This reflects the idea that texts are not set in stone. You might read a passage and wonder why the author left something out or what might provide a counterpoint to their argument. You can continuously ask yourself questions as you read.
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Now, reviewing is also essential. An engaged reader will reflect on what they’ve read previously. Before starting a chapter, they might flip back through what they read to recall the main ideas. A truly engaged reader can summarize, meaning they can restate an idea in their own words. This step gets you closer to comprehension.
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Last of all, an engaged reader applies what they’ve learned. This is perhaps the most crucial action because it reflects why we read technical texts to begin with. Nobody reads Practical Object-Oriented Design for the plot; we read to gain insights that will inform our work.
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An engaged reader can take the concepts from a text and adjust their approach at work. They can finish a technical text and when they read another, recall relevant ideas and recognize differing arguments. We can also apply these ideas to other areas of our lives.
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To review, an engaged reader previews the text before reading, connects while reading, questions the material, reviews what they’ve read, and is capable of applying the knowledge gained to various contexts.
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Now, let’s examine what this actually looks like in practice. Referring back to my experience, consider the book we were reading as an informal study group among engineers.”},{