How often do you get to read a long read from start to finish in one setting? For most people, I think it is kind of rare.
How often have you tried to pick up a long read again after a week and found out you cannot remember anything you have already read in the article? Probably also reasonably common.
As mentioned in the previous issue, The Reader that we are building already has the responsibility of calculating unfinished stories into your reading queue. This is helpful in terms of remembering to finish what the reader started.
But it should also get you back in the reading flow without scrolling back in the stories to figure out what it was all about.
In this issue, I will explore adding context setting of unfinished readings into The Reader.
The first obvious question is: what is the best way to recap an unfinished news story? It turns out reading retention on screens is a complicated topic. Some studies even suggest that the readers absorb more when reading on paper than on the screen. This creates even more pressure on The Reader to help to understand the context.
Other studies show that no matter which reading comprehension skill used - underlining, outlining, summarising, reading, re-reading - there is no real significant difference.
Summarise
Summarising is an obvious solution to the problem, but it does come with some efforts for the publisher. It could be done in two ways:
Summarise based on headlines (the easy solution)
Summarise based on a new data field (the not-so-easy-solution)
In the video, you can see my prototype of an article as I read it and how it would look in recap mode. Skimming the headings of the already-read section does provide a quick summary if they are well-written. It also creates space to continue where you left off.
It still does feel somewhat lazy, and I am not sure this would work well for all kinds of articles.
If we pursue adding a new data field called summary to each section, then we would have other possibilities. Image the data structure like this:
If The Reader knows you only have read the first section, it could start your new reading session by giving you the summary of section one first.
I do think this is a more elegant solution but does require slightly more work from the publisher. Let’s have a look at solutions where we move the workload to the reader.
Highlighting
Another way of enhancing reading comprehension and retention is to highlight paragraphs and review them after reading. This would move the summary responsibility to the reader instead of the publisher.
This would then lead to having the same recap screen as before but where the summary content is based on whatever the reader has highlighted.
This could be more meaningful for the reader but would probably also lead to several users not having a summary. Perhaps a combination of the two would be a good approach?
Previously, I’ve made a first pass at The Reader, The Editor and The Podcaster. If you haven’t read those already you should totally do that.
I would also appreciate if you shared this with a friend. You can either forward this mail or share the signup link on social media. Thank you.
How well do you remember what you read?
See you again in two weeks.