Here is a text taken from an addition I just made to the content of the cRD – 7 article. I thought some explanation of the term “snowplow reading” was in order:
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.