By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)

All too often reading is beloved by almost everyone who has learnt to read pretty well. Quite frankly, they want to try reading as many words as they see the minute they learn to read. It is really and truly a gentle thing as well as can be easily done just without costing a small fortune. Not every reader is, however, a person with a long memory for the simple reason that he, as always, forgets most of the things which he has read wheth­er consciously or unconsciously. Alternatively, some readers are not able to take hold of their reading material for long with their eyes shut. That is why such readers have not practised smart reading yet, of course. Smart reading usually includes silent reading or reading aloud, doing both deep reading and reading for pleasure, studying not only non-fiction but also literature, recounting nearly everything that has been read to the letter, and applying read­ing knowledge or aesthetics in the real world. Here, deep read­ing involves detailed reading, scanning, skimming, and even conditional reading. Providing that any reader has got smart reading, he will enjoy himself at all times of reading, and it may not take longer time for him to do reading than he has expected.

By the time reading is car­ried out, silent reading is mostly conducted, but reading aloud should be done sometimes. In the main, it cannot be denied that silent reading particular­ly used by the majority of ad­vanced readers gives them a faster reading speed than read­ing aloud; so, that will help save reading time for them. But the main purpose of getting read­ing aloud done is to be aware of the rhythmic schemes of poems or the writing flow of prose by authors through the sense of hearing as readers. Then, deep reading and reading for pleas­ure are frequently needed by the readers. They tend to decide on either reading in-depth or pleas­urable reading when absolutely necessary, as a matter of fact. It is certain that every piece of writing must not be performed by means of deep reading simply because some writing is intend­ed for pleasure only, otherwise, it will just last ages if amateur readers except for professional writers take enjoyable writing seriously. As mentioned above, detailed reading, scanning, skimming, and conditional reading have comprised deep reading. Detailed reading is es­sential to researchers, schol­ars, academics, and advanced learners since this reading certainly provide the linguistic forms, stylistic features, food for thought, and historical val­ues of any literature to them.

 By Longman, scanning is the process of reading something quickly in order to understand its main meaning or to find some particular information where­as skimming is the process of reading something quickly to find the main facts or ideas in it. As regards deep reading, condi­tional reading means choosing to read the currently requisite themes, especially when read­ers do not have enough time to read books from beginning to end. Conditional reading con­sists of skipping unnecessary points or chapters in a book and reading with ages or genres of literature or writers. What is more, any reader ought to read non-fiction for his good brain and literature for his kind heart.

Not only must a reader have a good grasp of the sub­ject matter but also, he should have known vocabulary usage, grammatical rules, modern ex­pressions, and stylistics after a fashion. I take the view that writing can be generally classi­fied into four types according to styles of writing: essay writing, article writing, story writing, and poetry writing. If all readers have seen how to organize each type of writing in advance, they could possibly grasp the subject matter and spoken or written languages or both from the writ­ing with their eyes closed. Fur­thermore, the first three types of writing relate to prose groups in general except that drama writing may probably contain a mixture of prose and poetry. The golden ages of poetry and drama had gone by in the world of global literature, as far as I knew. These days articles and so-called modern poems are still most well-known among quite a bit of book lovers in the cur­rent field of literature, I should think. It is imperative that each and every individual reader take good care of the common lin­guistic structures of a writing case, whichever writing is read.

It is normally assumed that an essay is neither an article nor a story. Notwithstanding, essays partly encompass the theories of articles and stories. Unless any writer knows all about essays, he might write down an article or a story to the core under the illusion that they will be both essays. Actually, the essay does not commonly express as many facts and figures as articles. In spite of this, the writer’s tender ideas, noticeable doubts, and unconscious desires would be found in an essay. Also, there may be partially included a story in the essay, but not the very sto­ry. An essay is, in short, merely an attempt to write something. Hence, an essay writer does not like making preparations for essays; he will write an essay by grabbing his sudden reflec­tion while having intrapersonal peace and quiet. Moreover, it is essays that shed nine sorts of aesthetics over fine art for maximum effect – 1) love be­tween husband and wife, 2) hu­mour or smile, 3) compassion, 4) harshness, 5) loathsomeness, 6) fear, 7) surprise, 8) bravery and 9) calm, which of these should exceptionally be suitable for literature. Virtually all essays contribute to the reader’s sense of feeling calm in their ends, no matter what aesthetic is in­volved – that pleasant feeling was once named a target feeling by Saya Zaw Gyi, a Myanmar national laureate and author.

An article is significantly different from an essay con­cerning the subject matter and essays can be divided up into a great many varieties: lead­ing articles, academic articles, educational articles, literary articles, linguistic articles, po­litical articles, religious articles, medical articles, health articles, technical articles, research ar­ticles, travel articles, articles of clothing, beauty articles, write-ups, scientific articles, narrative articles, and articles with a mixture of knowledge and pleasure. Besides having various items, articles are also more reliable, more valid, and more relevant regarding their entries, instances, proverbs, sayings, and quotations includ­ed. The most prominent style of article writing is quick and simple or short and to the point as well. In other words, they are not confused about their writ­ing principles like short stories and novels. Additionally, article readers will get to accept an opinion more critically and logi­cally than usual because articles offer an effective and efficient explanation. Great care should be taken that only the authors who have research fever write excellent but few articles.

There is a lot to make out in story writings: author, in­cident, subject, form, setting, theme, technique, plot, narra­tive, character, hero, heroine, protagonist, antagonist, narra­tor, dialogue, monologue, action, scene, premise, crisis, mental conflict, psychology, climax, sus­pense, trick, descent, ending, resolution, balance, taste, unity, and emphasis. When someone reads a story, it would be better if he has known about its writ­ers such as his love affair or married life. If so, he can easily get background knowledge or connotations of the story, for only occasionally are a story and its author directly linked. I do not think that every subject from an incident can be written as a story apart from one par­ticular subject that does stick in the writer’s mind. After that, he should think about which form of language to use – the written, spoken or both forms – for the subject which he has decided to write.

 Next, he ought to fix the setting, theme, and tech­nique of a story. The story comes alive with its perfect setting, and the central theme of a good story will never fade away. The techniques for creating stories differ as to authors’ own styles of writing. Only if plots and nar­ratives are interesting in a story would it become a flawless story. Nonetheless, apparent charac­ter traits are closely observed in classic stories. In a story are two kinds of characters – dead characters and living charac­ters – and these characters may be a hero, heroine, protagonist, antagonist, or even narrator.

Whoever they are, they are al­lowed to go into monologues or dialogues and take action with a scene.

Otherwise, they might come out like barely hand pup­pets for sure. The premise, cri­sis, mental conflict, psychology, climax, suspense, trick, descent, and ending occur in a story as its vital parts depending on the writer’s art of making up sto­ries. A resolution is the life of detective stories in particular. This is because a detective story that has an illogical resolution will not be meaningful by any means. The balance, taste, unity, and emphasis due to the sub­ject matter of a story are other careful factors in the eyes of the story, too.

Reading a poem, a reader has also got to be acquainted with the poet’s personal profile, his aim of writing the poem, and its relevant background infor­mation like history and events at first. Broadly speaking, there may be seen three kinds of poet­ry in the world of literature: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and pastoral poetry. Those kinds of poetry will probably call for the three basic facts mentioned above in full measure; provided that a poem reader gets fully informed about them, he can gain beyond doubt a deep insight into the poem, including its literal meaning and connotation. Based on how to compose poems, there are still other kinds of poetry – couplet, tercet, quatrain, quintain, ses­tet, septet, octet, nonet, free verse and so forth. In addition, the characteristics of poetry are repetition, imagery, tones, stan­zas, feet, poetic meters, rhymes and rhythms. Poems are iam­bic, trochaic, anapestic, dactyl­ic, spondaic, or pyrrhic as feet and have monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentame­ter, hexameter, heptameter, or octameter as poetic meters, to the best of my knowledge. The three sorts of beauty in poetry are still meant to be pure beauty like the beauty of a naturally beautiful girl, ornate beauty like the beauty of a pretty girl with make-up or in clothes, and gro­tesque beauty like the beauty of an ugly little girl. Reading up on a poem, its writer’s dis­tinctive style, characterization, first person (writing in the pro­nouns `I´ and `we´ ), second person (writing in the pronoun `you´), third person (writing in the pronouns `he´, `she´, `it´ and `they´), symbol, metaphor, simile, figurative, personifica­tion, alliteration, assonance, on­omatopoeia, oxymoron, irony, hyperbole, or cliché should be considered carefully.

Naturally, smart reading requires that literature lovers read a wide assortment of writ­ings and also learn to read so. As reading makes it ready that talk­ing points exist, literary group discussions can be held more often. From those discussions, bookworms should exchange information or ideas on how to read, imitate others’ high-quali­ty reading methods dissimilar to theirs, and improve their ability to read more than before. Smart reading is much better than av­erage reading and it means that readers ought to read to know about others, different places from theirs, and themselves, that is, self-reflection. Time spent on smart reading is time well spent. It is not a waste of time. Gifted persons find it read­ing to lead a successful or happy life. Too much time and money may be spent on smart reading, though this reading will have contributed enormously to read­ers’ making a better U-turn of life without a doubt. The longer the reading age is becoming, the more advanced smart reading is getting. So, let’s take up smart reading right now!