Narrative vs Ruminative Reading

Linear reading often fails in academic contexts. Discover how to switch modes for better comprehension.

Understanding the difference between linear narrative reading and non-linear ruminative engagement.

Narrative reading mode

In narrative reading mode, the reader follows the text and lets the story unfold. They build their understanding by following the writer’s design. They acquire sufficient background, come to an understanding of key concepts, and finally they will come to an understanding of the ‘real’ meaning of the text.

Unfortunately, this linear conception of reading is almost never suitable to academic texts. It fails to account for the fact, that fictional narratives are parasitic on pre-existing knowledge by the reader. The reader of a story already understands key schemas that the narrative simply fleshes out. The purpose of the narrative reading is as much to embody, replay or enjoy the process as it is to learn something new. Let alone in such a way that could be reduced to identifying and debating arguments.

With academic reading this is almost never the case. The expert in the field, who has sufficient background knowledge will rarely need to follow along with the entire narrative in them same way they do with a story. They will frequently seek out key points of new information (scanning) or to get a sense of the general argument (skimming) and only return to narrative mode for sections of the text or if they feel the structure of the argument is relevant in and of itself.

On the other hand, the novice academic reader will not have sufficient background knowledge to follow the text from beginning to end and hope to have the same level of understanding at the end that they will with a conventional narrative. Their cognition will be quite literally swamped with new concepts, leaving no room for any understanding.

This is why novice readers frequently report reading texts all the way through without having any sense of the overall message and often not even any of the particulars. And not only have they not developed any understanding of that particular text, they also have not contributed to their ability to better understand future readings.

Ruminative reading mode

An alternative to the narrative mode is the ruminative mode. Ruminative mode is non-linear, multimodal, and non-monotonic. On the surface, it can be described as a combination of skimming and scanning, or reading for gist combined with seeking specific information.

Domain experts reading deep within their expertise turn to this mode as a matter of convenience. They may alternate between narrative and ruminative modes depending on the level of engagement they wish.

Switching to this mode is essential for novice readers to build a deep semantic map of meaning. Without it, reading the text narratively is almost as useful as reading it in a foreign language.

Another aspect of the ruminative reading mode is that the reader is not confined to a single text. In fact, interleaving the reading of different texts in a ruminative mode can help the reader in the development of larger maps of meaning.

Returning to texts

Thinking about these modes is also essential when we consider how often readers of non-narrative texts return to them to find some information and confirm an intuition about them. The modes may be different on different visits or each visit may employ a different mode.

For example, a reader may choose to read narratively on their first encounter and return with a more ruminative frame of mind to look up information for later use. But another reader may choose to engage with the text in a ruminative mode on their first or even second encounter and only engage with it narratively once they have built a rich enough semantic map to be able to sustain the effort.