Reading with Purpose


Reading is thought to be one of few most essential activities human do to acquire knowledge. People read magazine, newspaper, books, website, in the hope that their insight of everything increase. Yet, the problem sometimes occurs in the mid, beginning or final stage of this activity. Not knowing the meaning of vocabulary, since a list of jargon covering up more than a half of the passage, and super complex grammar rules are two of lot of trouble encountered. So, what are we going to do in order to be a good reader if every time we kick off this literature habit, problematic events are almost ubiquitous to find?

The answer for this question can be simply explained with a single word "purpose". Without a purpose, almost all activities are unorganized. Have you ever experienced driving out your car around the city without parking and in the middle of the day you wonder why you have been doing such a aimless act? The example mentioned can be related with reading. Purposeless reading will create wilderness for the reader and as a result, the high expectation outcome dreamed before will end in vain.

There are three common purposes of reading that we usually do. The first is reading for pleasure -the instances can be taken from reading romance story, adventure book, doing puzzle-, reading for knowledge -school books, journal, newspaper- and reading for the exams. These different aims will direct how we treat the text.

Reading for pleasure does not create a lot of trouble for the readers since they have freedom to pick any source of the text they want to read. If the reader is an avid fan of thriller, so there is a big chance for him select the book on his preference. For this reason, most of us almost have no problem dealing with enjoying the activity of reading. The inner motivational drive causes reading for pleasure as the least problematic reading activity to tackle. Despite the ease, trivial matters such as limited mastery of vocabulary and complexity of the plot of a story are occasionally discovered. However, the reader will not think of them as obstacles since he enjoys following the narration. Simply cornering at a solitary cafe can be the best place to enjoy the story.

Another aim is reading for knowledge, which is a bit challenging compared too the aforementioned point. That happens since there are abundant of specific purposes, diverse materials used  and mediums to get the knowledge itself.  A lawyer who is in the middle of the trial aiming to help an innocent convicted needs to read the book about principles of law of 1000 pages to obtain the information about how the law should be enforce to the wrong criminals. In order to achieve this goal, he will try his best to read the books as he knows the consequence of it if he is incapable to defending the victim. Meanwhile a teacher needing solution to get the students attracted to his lesson will be willing to finish the book about methodology of teaching. Since the books read are academic and not common in daily life these two people take longer time to finish and digest what being explained in the books. This difficulty, of course, is lethargic but for the sake of getting the solution for their needs, the readers usually won't give up easily when encountering hardship. In some cases, even, they look for help from someone understanding more about the content. This shows reading for knowledge takes time, patience and persistence; somethings that surely we cannot apply if we want to read for the test.

When it comes to test, there are set up situations that we have to analyse first; let's take the example of time. Test is always limited by time and if we talk about this "time" in a more detailed way, it causes pressure. In some cases, smart students sometimes cannot perform well in the test because he/she feels more pressured compared to when she/he has to accomplish the task in the class. Another item tailing the exam is the high expectation to score as high as number possible. When the purpose of learning language has already shifted from comprehension to achieving high score, the act of studying will follow. The students who are supposed to enjoy learning must deal with the time and emotional management in order to ace the test and if we cannot cope with this, the result will tell that we are incapable. Are we? the statement is not really accurate since there are external factors affecting the performance. In regard of how we are supposed to treat reading for exam, the treat is more to be to the point (sometimes eliminating the initial concept of whole understanding of reading itself) and adding tips and tricks in order that the test takers ace the test. That's why every time we go on a course for taking preparation class before taking language test such as IELTS or TOEFL, the materials given are mostly about tips and tricks. These are an indication that test, sometimes, is only a matter of score not an understanding. So, let's say that we don't understand the entire content of the text, it's not a big deal as long you know how to answer the questions. 

In a nutshell, reading is once again an essential skill human need in order to gain view, knowledge, insight and many more. By understanding the purpose of reading, it's expected that we can treat the text differently either.  



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