How to explain what you read in your own words

You read a page, it all makes sense, and then someone asks what it said and you can't quite put it together. Explaining a text in your own words is the fastest way to find out what you actually understood. It's the idea behind the Feynman technique, and it works especially well for reading.

Why understanding while reading isn't the same as understanding

While you're reading, the author does the hard work for you. Each sentence leads to the next, the logic is laid out, and following it feels like understanding it. But following an explanation and being able to give one are different skills.

The gap only shows when the page is gone. That's why explaining in your own words is such a good test. You can't lean on the author's sentences, so you have to rebuild the idea yourself. If you can, you understood it. If you can't, you now know exactly where you didn't.

The Feynman technique, adapted for reading

The method is usually named after the physicist Richard Feynman, who was known for explaining hard ideas simply, though he never set it out as a formal technique himself. The version that works for reading has four steps:

1. Pick one section. A few pages at most.
2. Close the text and explain it on paper as if to a smart friend who hasn't read it. Plain words, short sentences.
3. Find where you got stuck. Mark every spot where you hesitated, borrowed the author's wording or went vague.
4. Go back for those spots only, then explain again, more simply.

Why "your own words" matters so much

If you reuse the author's phrases, you can produce a perfectly correct-sounding explanation without understanding a thing. The words are right, but they're borrowed. Putting an idea into different words forces you to know what it means, because you have to choose the new words yourself.

That's also why multiple-choice questions are a weak check. Picking the right answer from a list only shows you recognize it.

What a stall tells you

The useful part of this method isn't the explanation. It's the places where the explanation breaks. There are three common kinds:

• You can't start. You missed the main point of the section. Reread the first and last paragraphs, which usually state it.
• You reach for the author's term. You know the label but not the thing. Ask yourself what the term actually describes, without using it.
• You go vague. "Basically it's complicated" or "and so it works out" means a step in the reasoning is missing. Find the sentence in the text that makes the connection.

Each kind of stall points to a different spot to reread. That makes your second pass much shorter than reading the whole section again.

A worked example

Say you're reading an introductory economics chapter, and a section defines opportunity cost as the value of the best alternative you give up when you make a choice.

First attempt, from memory:

Opportunity cost is the cost of the opportunity you choose.

That's a stall of the second kind. It reuses the term to define itself and says nothing. Back to the text, then try again with a concrete case:

If I spend Saturday working a shift instead of studying, the opportunity cost of the shift is the studying I gave up. It's the best thing I could have done with that time instead.

Much better. Checking against the text shows two details worth keeping: it's only the best alternative, not every alternative added together, and it doesn't have to be money. Add those, and you have an explanation you could give in an exam or a conversation.

How long an explanation should be

Three to five sentences per section is usually right. Shorter, and it tends to be a label instead of an explanation. Much longer, and you're probably retelling the text instead of explaining it. A good test: could someone who hasn't read the book understand the idea from what you wrote?

Keep everything you write

Write your explanations in one place, section by section. By the end of a book, they add up to a summary written by the one person whose understanding matters to you. Rereading that is far more useful later than rereading the book, because it's in the words you already think in.

Why ClearRead asks you to type it

ClearRead's explain step asks you to write each section in your own words rather than pick from multiple choice, for exactly the reason above: choosing the right answer only proves you recognize it. Everything you write is collected per book as your own summary, which you can download and keep.

Start with one page

Take the page you read most recently. Close it and write three sentences for someone who hasn't seen it. Circle the spots where you stalled. Those circles are your reading list for tomorrow, and they're usually much shorter than you'd expect.