How to Read Difficult Books - A Guide for High School and College Students - American Educator Summer 2023

Oct 15, 2026

How to Read Difficult Books explains why textbooks feel hard to read and why engagement drops even when sentences are individually understood. It draws on research showing that readers often miss contradictions because they fail to coordinate meaning across sentences and paragraphs. The piece contrasts simple linear story structures with hierarchical textbook organization, then introduces learning-focused strategies, starting with why reading and highlighting is an ineffective approach for comprehension.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryExam

FormatPDF

Pages6

Reading Time15 min

AccessFree to download

Why textbooks are hard to read

Comprehension depends on cross-sentence meaning

When Reading to Learn

How to outsmart your brain

TIP 1—Don’t Do What Most People Do: Just read and highlight

How to Read Difficult Books A Guide for High School and College Students ILLUSTRAT IONS BY SERGE BLOCH By Daniel T. Willingham I t seems obvious why textbooks are hard to read. The material is dense; there’s a lot of information packed into relatively few words. Authors often feel obligated to give you a broad, complete understanding of a topic rather than to weave an interesting story from selected details. Teachers are ready to assign a textbook, even if it’s boring; it’s seen as a regrettable but unavoidable problem. But there’s a more subtle reason that it’s hard to stay engaged when you read a textbook. To find out why, read this paragraph, one you might find in a typical high school textbook. The Manhattan Project was the United States’ effort to produce a nuclear weapon, and it was the largest construction enterprise in the history of science. Because of its sensitive nature, a massive effort was made to keep the project secret. Famous scientists traveled under aliases; Enrico Fermi was known as Henry Farmer, for instance. And all telephone conversations atthe test sites were monitored. Despite those efforts, historians agree that it probably would have been Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology atthe University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, including the bestseller Why Don’t Students Like School? This article is drawn with permission from his latest book, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is HardandHow You Can Make It Easy. impossible to keep the secret if not for the fact that the project was of relatively small size. Did you notice that the last sentence contradicted the first? Embedding a mistake or contradiction into a text and seeing whether readers notice it is a common research technique to measure comprehension. Readers are asked to judge each text on how well it’s written and explain their rating. Readers are very likely to notice a word they don’t know. They are also very likely to notice if the grammar of a sentence is wrong. But they are much less likely to notice when two sentences contradict each other. Forty percent of high school students missed the contradiction in the paragraph above. To put it another way, if readers simply understand each sentence on its own, they figure they are doing what they’re supposed to do. Coordinating meaning across sentences is crucial to reading comprehension, because sentences can take on quite different meanings depending on the surrounding context. For example, consider a simple sentence,“Maxim waved,” indifferent contexts: Ann walked into the pizza parlor, looking for her friends. Maxim waved. The boat slowly circled the wreckage, looking for survivors. Maxim waved. “Oh, my God, that’s my husband!” Kate whispered.“Don’t do anything that would attract his attention!”Maxim waved. 28 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | SUMMER 2023 In one way, the sentence always means the same thing (the physical act of waving by Maxim), but the more important meaning—why Maxim waved and the likely consequences of his action—is very different. It can be appreciated only if you interpret the sentence in light of what you’ve already read. The same issue applies in a far more complex way to reading textbooks. Writers organize the material hierarchically, so readers often need to connect what they’re reading now to something they read a few pages ago. But readers expect a simple format. We first learn to read storybooks. Stories are easy to understand because the structure is simple and linear: A causes B, which causes C, and so on. Textbooks’ hierarchical format and content are more challenging, so you shouldn’t sit down to read a textbook and expect that the author will make your job easy. You need a different approach to reading such content. When Reading to Learn What your brain will do: It will read the way you read for pleasure, because that’s familiar to you and it’s not obvious that it won’t work. You’ll read making mi

FAQs

Why are textbooks harder to stay engaged with than other texts?

Textbooks are dense and push authors to cover broad topics quickly. More subtly, readers struggle to coordinate meaning across sentences and paragraphs, so understanding becomes less engaging and less accurate.

What research example shows that readers may miss contradictions?

The article notes that embedding a mistake or contradiction is used to measure comprehension. Many high school students missed a contradiction when each sentence was considered on its own.

Why is “read and highlight” a poor strategy for learning?

Highlighting fails to address the core problem of coordinating meaning across sentences and paragraphs. It also relies on the reader correctly judging what is important, which is often unreliable.

Oct 15, 2026

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