So, in this new version of R & D I just snowplow* the boring parts of a chapter (Susie) and isolate and go crazy with the one or two paragraphs that lend themselves to RT and TPR and stuff like that (Blaine). As stated, I have always wanted to blend those two opposing approach to reading novels, which Blaine indicated to me, as I said, that he thought could never be blended into one reading approach – and so that is what Compact R & D does – it blends snowplow reading (through the parts of the novel that are just not interesting) with the narrow and deep compact reading of just one or two paragraphs per chapter as described in this article, and it does so in an effective way.
Obviously, to go narrower and deeper, we have to go line by line. I stated that before in this article. I am repeating a lot here because I learn by repeating things over and over until I get them. We have to be ready to spend up to a half an hour or more on one sentence if it is the right one, the one that has energy, the one that Jason Fritze would go off on in an RT tear as only he can. That sentence.
*The snowplow should indeed be a slowplow – nice and steady. It is as simple as it sounds. We read for as long as we can with a kind of steady rhythm like a train going very slowly clackety-clack down the tracks so that, as Susie said often, a movie is created in the mind of the reader.
That is the goal – the movie. Believe it or not, this movie is a very valid form of CI where the reader actually is focused on the images created – the movie. It is just as in a story when the students are listening and creating images except that in this case they are reading. We are still doing CI.
Like in auditory CI, interruptions to the snowplow process are just as dangerous and destructive as they are in the story asking process.
Another point about snowplow reading is a point Robert made here:
…the snowplow is a snowplow, but every once in a while you put it in park, jump off and go play in the snow. Two completely different activities….
Here Robert is referring, at least the way I read it, to the need to take frequent brain breaks when doing snowplow reading. Otherwise, it is too boring.