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How to Read
Abstract
Over the course of the eighteenth century, ideas about delivery and linguistic effect were repackaged in more plentiful and accessible forms for aspirational audiences eager to acquire skills of self-improvement. We see a tension between nostalgia for ancient eloquence, so privileged in the early modern period, and a new emphasis on polite style and genteel social accomplishment. Reading out a written text becomes a popular art form, hobby, spectator sport, subject of academic enquiry, and topic of satire. This chapter explores the culture of learning to read well, and considers what it was that the good reader was supposed to be doing.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“There have been many strategies and supporting resources developed to help inexperienced readers engage with the primary literature [6,8–14].”
From Perceptions of scientific research literature and strategies for reading papers depend on academic career stage (2017) · cites this paper as [10]
Metadata
- Authors
- Williams, A.
- Corresponding author
- Williams, Abigail
- Venue
- The Social Life of Books
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Published
- 2017-06-27
- OpenAlex
- W2794154804
- Cited by
- 0
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Yale University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Historical and Literary Analyses
- Social Sciences › Education › Historical Education Studies Worldwide
- Keywords
- reading, reading instruction, 18th century, delivery, eloquence, human development, reading culture, satire
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How to Read. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.12987/yale/9780300208290.003.0002
- The paper
- Williams, A. (2017). How to Read. The Social Life of Books. https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300208290.003.0002
