The Printer vs. Painter Reading

 

Take a picture of a beautiful scene with your mobile or digital camera. Now print this picture using a printer. Do you see how the printer prints the photo? If you cancel the print midway and remove the unfinished paper you will see that the photo is completely finished in the printed part but the rest of the page is blank.

The printer prints the photo dot by dot, line by line. The printer determines exactly the shade of the color to put in the infinitely small dot at the beginning of the line, then the next dot to it, and so on till a line is printed. Next, it will move one line below and repeat the process. The dots and lines are so close together that they appear as one continuous picture.

Now you try to paint the same photo on paper or canvas. Or if you are not artistically inclined then give it to your artistic friend. How will you or he/she proceed? Most likely the artist will first make a rough sketch on the entire paper, then paint in rough outline, fill in the rough colors, and then finally put in the highlights. The artist will be working on the entire paper in one go.

Note the difference between a machine printer and a human painter. The printer prints dot by dot, line by line while the human artist looks at the complete picture and paints accordingly.

How is it connected to learning? 

Although we are human, while reading conventionally, we read like a machine printer.

We start from the first letter, then the next letter, and so on till a line is complete. Then we go to the next line and so on. This may be the right approach if you are reading a mystery novel, but for other purposes, you can consider reading like how an artist paints a picture.

The alternative approach is to first gain the big picture of the entire chapter. Before reading the entire chapter word by word, first read only the main headings of the chapter like an artist drawing the rough outline on the entire paper or canvas to get an idea of where each thing is situated.

Then read the headings along with the sub-headings equivalent to painting the rough outlines in colors. Then read the headings, sub-headings, and any figures, diagrams, tables, and summary boxes like an artist further filling in more colors.

Once you have gained a good idea of the chapter through these three readings,  then start reading conventionally, word to word, line by line. Obviously, this method is more likely to work in a text which has lots of concepts and is organized in heading and sub-headings.

Different persons have different styles of reading and learning. Try and see if the 'artistic' method of reading works for you or not.

— ND

© Author. All rights reserved. 

Please share this post on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

If viewing from Mobile, switch to Webpage view to see a list of popular posts and index of topics of previous posts.

Please give your valuable feedback via the comments below. Please note that comments will appear later only after moderation. Please Log in with Google Id before writing comments.

You can receive a notification on the latest post by subscribing via clicking on the bottom of the page on the Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

DISCLAIMER: This article is intended only for fun purposes. The author does not promote or recommend any behavior illustrated here or claim it to be useful. Use the information herein is at your one's own risk. Before trying to emulate or follow anything the reader is well advised to take into account ethical, moral, legal, and other considerations. The author recommends that Medical Practice should be of the highest ethical and moral level keeping in mind the interest of the patient as foremost. The author recommends that Medical Education should be of the highest ethical and moral level keeping in mind the interest of the patient and students as foremost and according to NMC and other Board norms.