Reading strategy: Reading between and beyond the lines

Listen to this text: “Felicia wraps the long woolly scarf several times around her neck and pulls her hat over her ears. She trudges through the streets, that have not yet been plowed, all the way down town.” What’s going on here? What kind of weather is it, what time of the year? Felicia is heading downtown. But in what city - and in what country?

As an active reader, you may have already drawn some conclusions: The woolly scarf that she wraps around her neck is a clue: that it’s cold weather outside, winter. Streets, that have not yet been plowed… also implies winter… ...and also that this is a place where it is normal for streets to be plowed - so, she must be in a city where it snows in the winters. None of this is written in the text. But still, it is there! But, it’s not contained in the lines, but sort of inbetween the lines.

When you first learned to read, you only read what was written in the lines. If it’s a simple text, then that’s enough most of the time... But if you’re reading fiction… ...then you’ll often have to read between the lines too, if you want to understand the entire story. To read between the lines, is to draw conclusions based on what is written in the lines. But hang on a moment - in that case, we’re making stuff up!

How far can you go, guessing and speculating? Pretty far actually. Let’s go back to Felicia. “Felicia picks up her phone and looks at it again. It’s still 7.03 pm. She leans forward, and looks up along the empty street.

In a shop window she catches sight of her own reflection. The lipstick looks right. She adjusts the new skirt a bit. And looks at her phone again. 7.04 now.” What kind of clues do you get from these paragraphs?

Why does she look up along the street, and check the time over and over? If it were to turn out that Felicia is waiting for someone, would you then be surprised? And why is she wearing lipstick and a new skirt, that she adjusts… It seems she wants to make an impression on someone — someone she thinks ought to show up by now..? Is it perhaps a date she is waiting for? Compare to the first text: If we know that someone is wearing a woolly scarf and that the street is not yet plowed, then we can be pretty certain that it’s winter time.

But we can’t be quite as sure why Felicia has dressed up and put on makeup.. or if she is nervous or perhaps fancies the person she’s waiting for. We have gone further now, and don’t just read between the lines. Now we go outside the text, and read beyond the lines. When we read beyond the lines, we ask ourselves questions about why people do what they do.

The reading strategy to read between and beyond the lines, is closely related to the reading strategy making text connections. Try for yourself! Next time you read a story, take a pause, and ask questions like: What relationship do the people here have? How is she feeling right now? Why is she feeling like that?

What’s going to happen next? Why? What clues are there in the text that can help me understand more? The answers to these questions are not written in the lines. You create them yourself, inside your head!

When you are active and create a part of the story yourself, you get more engaged, and the story gets more alive. A fancy word for drawing this kind of conclusion, is to make inferences. So, we have three ways to read: On the line. Then we make no inferences at all. Between the lines.

Then we make simple inferences. And Beyond the lines. Then we make more advanced inferences, that also ask why the characters do what they do.