Reading largely comes naturally from having situational awareness. The way I think about it is: you need to be able to understand what's actually happening before you can know what you are able to do, and you need to know what you are able to do before you are able to know what you should do.
Breaking things down into discrete situations gives a context for which you can determine what the opponent's patterns are, and from that, what your adjustment should be. Knowing "my opponent always does (or tends to do) this under these circumstances" is vastly more useful than knowing "my opponent does this a lot", because you reduce the number of variables you have to consider down to a level that lets you make decisions for which you can be reasonably confident of the outcome. You can't just beat someone (for example) down tilting as Marth in general, because there is no option that just beats that option in general. There are, however, options that beat that option in certain specific situations, which is why you enable yourself to challenge it by recognising the situations in which it is being applied.
If you recognise the opponent's habits in a specific situation, then you don't have to be restricted to waiting for the option before you can know what you should be responding with (which is often not possible anyway due to the limitations imposed by reaction time) or just throwing out a guess and hoping they'll choose that option because they do it "a lot". Now, you're waiting for the situation in which they do the option, and when you see that situation you can be confident of what they will do. In other words: by knowing the habitual option in the context of the situation it's applied to, in the future so long as you notice that situation then you can extrapolate the opponent's likely option choice from it.
