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Idiom: Read between the lines
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Math, Biology and Physics are all sciences.
English is not a science; it’s an art.
As with all art forms, you can only have a genuine appreciation and unravel the mystery once you learn to read between the lines.
If you can read between the lines, you can understand the difference between what people say or write and what they actually mean.
Even though they work extremely hard, some of my students fail to realize this.
They spend hours and hours dissecting sentences and looking up definitions in dictionaries when they should be reading between the lines.
Now, I understand it’s not easy.
It is an art form.
Sure, anybody can learn to read words, but gaining the ability to understand the meaning behind those words depends on how well you understand two factors.
The first is who is writing or saying those words.
The second is in what context are they being written or spoken.
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Everything is open to interpretation.
Learn that, and you will be well on your way to reading between the lines.
When studying English as a second or foreign language in school, the material is usually carefully chosen or modified to make it as simple and easy to understand as possible.
Unfortunately for students, upon leaving the classroom, they have to deal with the real world.
Out here, very little is simplified, and the ability to read between the lines is essential.
The next time you read something in English, don’t only concentrate on the words.
Think about who wrote it, when they wrote it, why they wrote it, the context it was written in and what they are trying to say rather than understanding the exact words.
When my wife says we’re having fish for the fourth time in a week, I say, “Oh great!”
Then she becomes upset.
I should never have taught her to read between the lines!
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 71.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.
