All of us read something or the other every day. Can we make use of a small part of that reading to improve our English language skills – mainly written English, but to some extent spoken English as well – at a much faster rate than we currently are?
Yes, we can. (The similarity of this sentence to Mr. Obama’s 2008 election slogan is purely coincidental.)
Through reading slowly and attentively, crawling in other words. (After writing this post, I came across the concept of intensive and extensive reading. Crawl method in intensive reading taken even further, more granular.)
If you can make crawling a regular habit, you’ll improve your English language skills at a much faster clip than your peers.
Maxwell Nurnberg and Morris Rosenblum in their book How to build a better vocabulary advocate pausing while reading to increase vocabulary in a big way:
But if you’re really serious about increasing your vocabulary in a big way, you’ll find it pays to stop to think of individual words. You’ll even want to give up a little of the relaxed enjoyment there is in reading and devote some thoughtful attention to new words…
You can, however, crawl to improve many other aspects of English language – and not just vocabulary.
How to do it?
Crawl a small sample of what you read daily to observe how grammar and other rules have been used – sometimes broken – by the best in the business. You can read anything – books, magazines, and articles. You can read online or offline.
I prefer books. When reading a book, I slow down on 2-3 pages to actively notice choice of words, variation in length of sentences, transition words between sentences and paragraphs, punctuation (especially comma, which can be confusing), how arguments are made and demolished, and so on. Reading does improve English Language Skills.
However, what you pay attention to depends on your current level? If you’re a beginner, you may also want to look at how grammar rules have been applied.
But if you want to take more out of this method, you should ideally get as much well versed with the rules as possible, especially on punctuation and writing. Otherwise, you wouldn’t even know why the author has written something the way s/he has.
Why this method works?
1. You’re attentive, which implies better, faster learning
First, and most important, you pay attention. And when you pay attention you learn English better and faster. To quote John Medina, a leading authority on brain study and founding director of two brain research institutes, from his book Brain Rules:
The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded – that is, learned – and retained… Whether you are an eager preschooler or a bored-out-of-your-mind undergrad, better attention always equals better learning.
To provide expert view from the world of linguistics, I’ll paraphrase Richard Smith, professor emeritus at Department of Language Studies, University of Hawaii. According to his noticing hypothesis, learners learning second language need to notice (or pay attention to) grammatical and other features of the language to learn it.
In your regular reading, you pay attention to the content, but not to the nitty gritty of the language used. That’s one of the reasons why most people have basic to average English language skills despite reading every day. (And when you pay attention to the language like you do in Crawl Method, you struggle to understand the content, but that’s fine because you’ve doing it for just few minutes. That’s what attention to details does.)
Write Sentences Like in Newspapers and Books
Step-by-step process. Little grammar. Real-world examples.
2. You learn from authentic content
Second, you learn from a real-world, complete output, which is in contrast to the compartmentalized learning (tenses, articles, comma, and so on) many of us go through. Swimming in a pool too has its importance when you’re learning to swim, but you got to take to rough waters – real situations – soon and spend more time there.
3. You learn from the best
Last, you learn from some of the best writers and authors.
Here are two examples from the web and two from books explaining how you can learn from Crawl Method. Each example comprises of text from the source followed by learnings from it. For ease of browsing, relevant parts have been underlined wherever possible and numbered.
Example 1
Text
In venture capital, a variant on the Glengarry Glen Ross mandate is most fund managers’ modus operandi: Always. Be. Raising.
Learnings
‘Always be raising’ has been split into three fragments to lay emphasis. Some also write fragments in all caps to bring the same effect. BTW, you won’t find this in any grammar book.
Related posts:
- Which novels (difficulty wise) to read to improve English?
- 5 ways reading improves English
- 25+ tips on improving written English
- Definitive guide on writing standout emails
Example 2
Text
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, SpaceX explained that the layoffs are in pursuit of becoming a “leaner company” and that they were only necessary due to “the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead.”
To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company. Either of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations. This means we must part ways with some talented and hardworking members of our team. We are grateful for everything they have accomplished and their commitment to SpaceX’s mission. This action is taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.
Learnings
You enclose sentences or fragments in quotes (“”) if they’re used verbatim from what someone said.
Here, the article picks underlined fragments as it is from the statement issued by SpaceX (same fragments shown in bold).
Example 3
Text
That’s the power of the Brain Rule. Learning results in physical changes in the brain, (1) and these changes are unique to each individual. Not even identical twins having identical experiences (2) possess brains that wire themselves exactly the same way. Given this, can we know anything (3) about the organ? Well, yes (4). The brain has billions of cells whose collective electrical efforts work in a similar fashion. Every human comes equipped with a hippocampus, a pituitary gland, (5) and the most sophisticated thinking store of electrochemistry on the planet: (6) a cortex. These tissues function the same way in every brain. How then can we explain the individuality? Consider a highway (7).
Source: Brain Rules by John Medina
Learnings
(1) A comma before a conjunction (‘and’) introducing an independent clause (‘these changes are unique to each individual’)
(2) Restrictive clauses are not set off by commas. That’s why this sentence has not been written as: Not even identical twins, having identical experiences, possess brains that wire themselves exactly the same way.
(3) Italics is used to emphasize. Here the author is laying stress on the word ‘anything’.
(4) ‘Well, yes’ doesn’t make a complete sentence. Such expressions are called fragments and they’re used to bring variety to the writing – a fragment preceded and followed by relatively long sentences.
(5) The two preceding commas are listing commas used here to separate a list of three. Also note that here a comma precedes ‘and’. This is American style. Had it been written in British style, there would have been no comma before ‘and’.
(6) Notice the use of colon. What follows a colon explains or elaborates what precedes it. Here ‘cortex’ elaborates ‘most sophisticated thinking store of electrochemistry on the planet’.
(7) Sentences of same length and similar style make writing or speech monotonous. Short, punchy sentences like these bring variety. The fragment in point # 4 serves a similar purpose. This sentence also acts as a glue or transition for the next paragraph which compares highways with neural pathways.
Example 4
Text
I wonder if this is what happened to Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass. They were both young reporters who skyrocketed to the top – on fabricated articles. Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for her Washington Post (1) articles about an eight-year-old (2) boy who was a drug addict. The boy did not exist, (3) and she was later stripped of her prize. Stephen Glass was the whiz kid of The New Republic (4), who seemed to have stories and sources reporters only dream of. The sources did not exist and (5) the stories were not true.
Did Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass need to be perfect right away? Did they feel that admitting ignorance would discredit them with their colleagues? Did they feel they should already be like the big-time (6) reporters before they did the hard work of learning how? “We were stars – precocious stars,” wrote Stephen Glass, “and that was what mattered.” (7) The public understands them as cheats, and cheat they did. But I understand them as talented young people – desperate young people – (8) who succumbed to the pressures of the fixed mindset.
Source: Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
Learnings
(1, 4) This is another use of italics: books, films, journals, and so on. (Observe how I used colon that we covered in point # 6 in the previous example.)
(2, 6) Hyphens are used to form compound modifiers. The entire word ‘eight-year-old’ refers to ‘boy’ and not its individual components. So does ‘big-time’ to ‘reporters’.
(3) A comma before a conjunction (‘and’) introducing an independent clause (‘she was later stripped of her prize’)
(5) When the conjunction ‘and’ connects two independent clauses that are closely related, the comma can be omitted.
(7) Note how commas are placed in the quotation, how the quotation is broken into two at its natural pause (it’s not broken at ‘that’, for example), and how the second part begins with a small letter.
(8) The pair of dashes separates a strong interruption (‘desperate young people’) from the rest of the sentence. (Note that a dash is different from a hyphen.) In contrast, a weak (or slight) interruption can be separated by a pair of commas.
Please note that, depending on your current English language skills, your learnings in the above two extracts can be different from the ones mentioned above.
And it’s fine if you don’t understand why the author has used a rule in certain way. Don’t let it frustrate you. Skip such instances. With time, you’ll get there.
