A Must Read Post by a Brilliant Blogger: “How to Read” by Brian Clark

You know how to read, but are you really reading?  Reading is not as simple as you might have thought and it is deeper than you ever could have imagined.

Normally, I try to post on a schedule but this is an exceptional post I feel would be a crime to deprive you from if even for a moment.  It is a piece written by Brian Clark who is an A-List blogger, a talented writer, and one of the founding editors over at Copyblogger.

Being that The Muslim Blogger is geared towards Muslims, I wanted to just make one comment for you to keep in mind while reading this.  Imagine if we could use these skills when it came to our deen and benefiting our communities.  Imagine if we use these skills when reading the Qur’an and Hadith of the Prophet (saw).

If we use these skills, our discussions will be infinitely better and our questions to the scholars of our ummah will be more targeted and specific. Of course that doesn’t mean we can just come up with our own tafseers of ayat, interpretations of hadith, or go around giving fatwas. However, what it does mean is that we can become true seekers of knowledge.

When you finish reading the post, be sure to come back here to TMB and share your thoughts.  I’ve placed the opening of Brian Clark’s piece here for you to start, but I definitely think this is a post that you must read.

“Who needs to learn how to read?

After all, we all learned how to read fairly early in life, usually in elementary school, right?

But do you know how to really read?

More importantly, are you really reading?

Reading can make you a better writer, as long as you’re paying attention and leaving time to actually write. But what we’re talking about here is what you say, rather than how you say it.

If you haven’t noticed, competition in the world of online content is fierce. Anyone playing to win is searching high and low for information that others don’t have, which for many means subscribing to a ridiculous number of RSS feeds.

While seeking out novel information from a wide variety of sources is admirable, it doesn’t necessarily give you an advantage. The ancient Greeks had a label for those who were widely read but not well read—they called them sophomores.

As in sophomoric… not a second-year college student (I suppose there’s not really much of a distinction).”

Click here and read the rest of this post – you won’t regret it.

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When you come back, think about whether you agree with Brian or not.  Did you think he left something out?  Can you think of other ways these skills could be beneficial to us as Muslims?  Have YOU applied any of these skills in your life so? (Photo: Copyblogger)