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Old 07-19-2011, 04:27 AM   #13 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aberkok View Post
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Explain.

Sorry, everyone else, but knowing what I know about this bookworm, I am baffled. The vocab number I can accept. The "I've never read very much" I don't.
I grew up in a household where reading wasn't a priority. It was passively encouraged on rare occasions, but it was mostly a case of it not being actively discouraged.

The majority of my reading was done in school. At home, it was mostly television and video games. It was that way until I became a teenager and got into D&D. I read the game materials and read several of the novels (maybe 15 to 20 of them, max.). When I got into high school, I stopped playing D&D and was mostly into video games. I was a slacker from grades 9 to 12, where I only partially read most of the assigned novels. I probably completed reading only a few novels (I'd say 3 at most) during that time.

It was in the OAC (grade 13) year where I started to apply myself. I think I read most of the materials then, but there were still many incomplete reads there as well. It was difficult to shake bad habits. I enjoyed myself though. It was then I realized the the arts were my strength.

However, I went to college to study business/marketing. It was then that I formed better reading habits. I graduated with an A average and was considered among the top of my class. But even then, I would only read school materials. I was still gaming in my spare time.

After college, I was lost regarding my career path, knowing I wasn't really into marketing. So I reflected on the joys of my OAC year and figured studying English was what I wanted. That was when I started reading regularly, mostly capital-L "Literature" and a heck of a lot of it: I ended up taking a specialized English degree, which is basically so many English courses for it to be like a double major (i.e. I crowded out any potential minor).

At that time, I pined over reading on my own for the first time since the D&D novels in my teenage years. However, I didn't have the time. I did read a couple of novels such as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and DeLillo's White Noise on my own time, but not much else.

When I finally graduated, I was already working full time at the book publisher I currently work for. By the time I finished college and started at university, I was already well versed in using language in a formal sense, both in writing and editing. I suppose I always had that strength, but I only exercised it during my post-secondary education.

Even today I struggle to read a lot on my own time. Now that I read for a living, it takes discipline to sit down in the evenings and read some more. For example, I've had A Dance with Dragons for a week now, and I'm still on page 9. I try to read the news, but I tend to only scan headlines or the first few paragraphs of interesting articles.

I find myself falling a lot into tl;dr with anything that isn't a novel, which I tend to read in small chunks over a long period. I read maybe a handful of novels a year now (not including work).

I'm a slower-than-average reader and I don't have the best short-term memory. I understand the language and how it fits together, but I don't have a great vocabulary beyond the core essentials of the language.

I found many of the words in this vocabulary test to be too advanced or elaborate to be of any use in most applications (e.g., trade books and consumer magazines, etc.---i.e., for the average reader).

For the past several years, I've been meaning to beef up my reading. There are many books I want to read before I die. There are other books I want to read for fun. (Basically literary vs. genre novels.) However, I find myself gravitating back to the computer to browse the net or play games.

Okay, so that was probably long-winded, but there you have it. I was never a strong reader, and it was only because I earned an English degree that it might appear otherwise.

I think one advantage I have is I'm a quick learner, I can adapt quickly to situations, and I'm good at processing and organizing information. Maybe it's the combination of these things that make me appear far more well read than I actually am.

(From what I've read on the board here, the average TFPer has read far, far more books than I have.)
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