Reading Between the Lines

During my MBA studies I came across the term "reading between the lines" several times. What a confusing term it was! I used to see blank space between the lines. What to read then?

Use of the term sky-rocketed in strategy papers. Now even in an HBR article it was told that you have to read between the lines. What to read as there is nothing between lines.

Initially it was all about finding out the inferred meaning, the implicit message. Reading between the lines meant "apply your brain to understand that the author wants to say without saying explicitly". But as the MBA journey (thank god! for me it was never a journey of 2/2 matrices) moved towards it climax (believe me, most of my friends and I call it anti-climax!) I realized reading between the lines could be more than its dictionary meaning. It's not only what the author is saying implicitly, it's also about why the author is saying whatever he is saying. Is there any personal bias, is there any tampering of facts and so on.

In some of the subjects terms like asymmetry, distinct yet implicit, network dynamics helped me to understand reading between the lines also requires connecting what you have read in the lines and between the lines from different sources. The understanding that the obvious sources, widely considered as reliable could also be tampered helps to read between the lines. For example the newspapers we read might get influenced by govt, corporations and political parties. In the present context the newspaper industry will love to see these entities as their customer as they pump money through advertisements. The newspaper reader could be fooled by their nexus. And what one gets to read could be a tampered, lopsided view of the situation. Forget about the newspapers, we have seen people complaining the kind of distortions we have in our text books.

Reading between the lines is difficult. It is equally difficult to identify what not to read in the explicit writing also.

My initial concerns of how to read between the lines is still unresolved. What to read (not to read) in what has been written in the lines has also become equally important concern.