You know how when you buy a book and you open it to page one and start reading until you’re done? Well, you’re missing out on a much richer and more enlightening reading experience. There’s a better way.

Inspectional Reading: My favorite thing about inspectional reading is that it permits you to quickly put the book away because it doesn’t serve the purpose you expected it to serve. But more than that, this level of reading enables you to get a lot out of a book quickly if you decide to proceed with it. And if still you decide to give it an analytical read (you should do so rarealy), then you’ll elevate yourself to the level of the author and become his equal in wisdom.

Analytical Reading: I attempted analytical reading on the last part of this book and found it very difficult at first because I was combining the rules. For example, I was trying to find the terms (rule 5), while at the same time the propositions (rule 6), and arguments (rule 7). Then I tried a different approach: I read a section while only applying rule 5, then I re-read it applying rule 6, and so on. As I did this with a few sections, I started to spot terms, propositions and arguments simultaneously. This might mean that when you start an analytical reading of a book, you might have to reread sections applying one rule at a time, but then as you go deeper into the book, the rules of a stage or even the multiple stages start to coalesce into one. The third stage of analytical reading can only be completed after you’ve done the first two.

I haven’t attempted syntopical reading. If I do, I’ll update this document.

On selecting books worth an analytical reading

Levels of Reading

  1. Elementary
  2. Inspectional
  3. Analytical
  4. Syntopical

Basic Rules of Reading

  • Most books should only be read inspectionally. Analytical and syntopical reading only apply to books that are over your head1 and worth reading for you.
  • Every page and passage in a book should be read no more slowly2 than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension. Variation of speed is key. Applies to inspectional3, analytical and syntopical reading.
  • A demanding reader is one who has formed the habit of asking the four basic questions and knows how to answer them precisely and accurately. Pay heed to the last two questions.
  • When reading a book, you must be in one of the four levels. Know which level you are in to read it appropriately4.
  • Only seek out external aids to reading if you have done all you can to understand the book according to the rules of reading laid out here. Aids include: your own experiences, as a first resort, second, see if the book has a prerequisite (Articles of Confederation, Constitution -> Federalist Papers), third, refer to abstracts and commentaries but rarely and never before reading the book, finally, use pedias and dictionaries, but know how to ask them questions.

The Four Basic Questions

The goal of reading actively for inspectional, analytical and syntopical reading is to constantly ask and try to answer the following four questions:

  1. What is the book about as a whole? You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.
  2. What is being said in detail, and how? You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.
  3. Is the book true, in whole or part? After you’ve answered 1 & 2, you must decide if you agree or disagree or are agnostic. Don’t take the author’s argument as true. Make up your own mind.
  4. So what? How does this affect my way of thinking of my way of living? Has my perspective shifted? Will I behave differently? Do I need to read more on the subject?

The last two questions are the most significant and our work in the first two is to find their answers.

Inspectional Reading

Many quite good readers, are unaware of the value of inspectional reading. They start a book on page one and plow steadily through it, without even reading the table of contents. They are thus faced with the task of achieving a superficial knowledge of the book at the same time that they are trying to understand it. That compounds the difficulty.

Stage I: Systematic Skimming

Stage II: Superficial Reading

Stage I, skimming, prepares us to to tackle the first stage of analytical reading: comprehension of the book’s structure. Whereas, stage II, superficial reading, prepares us for the second stage of analytical reading, namely interpretation of the book’s content. We cannot interpret a book’s content well unless we have read it a first time.

The two parts could be done simultaneously by the skilled reader, but until you become a skilled inspectional reader, do them as separate tasks.

Inspectional reading is active (you’re not leaning on a wall flipping through a book): as you read, you’re always looking to answer the four basic questions all active readers must answer. Constantly keep asking with the purpose of trying to find the answers.

Although you won’t have time to take extensive notes in inspectional reading, when you start getting answers to the following questions, you should note them anyway for when you come back to the book for an analytical read whether in a week or in months5.

  1. What kind of book is it?
  2. What is it about as a whole?
  3. What is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?

Stage I: Systematic Skimming

After this reading, you may decide that the book is not worth Stage II (Superficial Reading) and put it away. You will at least have known what kind of book it is and what the author’s main contention is.

Assume the following attitude before you begin stage I (all levels and stages for expository work, actually): Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book’s general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer.

Steps to complete Stage I:

  1. Look at the title page and, if the book has one, at its preface. Read each quickly. Get a feel for what the angle the author is taking and what his aim is. Categorize the book in your head with similar books you’ve read.
  2. Study the table of contents to obtain a general sense of the book’s structure; use it as you would a road map before taking a trip. It’ll give a sense of how the author is planning to address his main contention.
  3. Check the index look for topics, works and authors that are referenced many times and read some of those passages, they may contain the crux of the author’s argument.
  4. Read the publisher’s blurb. Many times it summarizes and lists the author’s main points in the book. 1-4 are pre-skimming: you may now decide to not read the book, or read it later or continue with skimming proper.
  5. Look now at the chapters that seem to be pivotal to its argument. Read their opening and closing paragraphs, especially the summary kinds. Your still vague understanding of the book should be gaining some resolution.
  6. Finally, turn the pages, dipping in here and there, reading a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages in sequence, never more than that. Only do this at the important paragraphs to get a pulse for the book. For sure, read the last few pages of the main part of the book (not epilogue). It’ll most likely contain a summary of the whole book. You might need to go this far to classify some books that are hard to classify.

Outcomes:

  1. You stopped around step 4 and decided to stop reading.
  2. You complete Stage I and decided to stop reading.
  3. You completed Stage I and decide it’s worth a superficial reading and maybe analytical reading.

In all cases, you know what kind of book it is and you know what its main arguments are and how the author has outlined it.

Stage II: Superficial Reading

One rule only: In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away. You will have a much better chance of understanding it on a second reading, but that requires you to have read the book through at least once. This is the definition of superficial reading.

We are incorrectly trained to pay the most attention to things that we don’t understand. If we use this habit in superficial reading, then we will miss the forest for the trees. We will not get very far in our reading. And most importantly:

  • We won’t be reading well on any level. Neither superficial nor analytical.
  • We will miss out the chance of reading the whole book and at least benefiting from the what we DO understand.

Remember how we read Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. We underlined, looked things up, and were never able to complete it. We put it aside. If we had known how to read superficially, we would have completed it and benefited much more from it.

This does not mean read so quickly that you’re struggling with comprehension. No, it’s an activity with a goal of answering the first of the four basic questions.

Outcomes: you have a good understanding of the book as far as the structure goes and some interpretive insights.

Analytical Reading6

You cannot begin this type of reading unless you’ve already completed an inspectional reading. That reading preps for this.

Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it.

You should not take the term “stage” below in a chronological sense, unless perhaps at the very beginning of your exercise as an analytical reader7. That is, it is not necessary to read a book through in order to apply the first four rules, then to read it again and again in order to apply the other rules. The practiced reader accomplishes all of these stages at once.

Stage I: Rules for finding what a book is about (rules 1-4): Structural outlining:

  1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter.
  2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity.
  3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole.
  4. Define the problem or problems the author has tried to solve.

Stage II: Rules for interpreting a book’s contents (rules 5-8): Interpretation

  1. Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words.
  2. Grasp the author’s leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences.
  3. Know the author’s arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequence of sentences.
  4. Determine which of his problems the author has solved, and which he has not; and of the latter, decide which the author knew he had failed to solve.

Stage III: Rules for criticizing a book as a communication of knowledge (rules 9-15): Criticism.

Arguably, the most important part of analytical reading and why we did Stage I & II

A. General Maxims of Intellectual Etiquette

  1. Do not begin criticism until you have completed your outline and your interpretation of the book. (Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment, until you can say “I understand.”) _Remember’s Mortimer’s rule to his students post-presentations. When they want to critique, he firsts tests them on whether they understood: say it in your own words, give me a real world or imagined example.
  2. Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously.
  3. Demonstrate that you recognize the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting good reasons for any critical judgment you make.

B. Special Criteria for Points of Criticism

  1. Show wherein the author is uninformed.
  2. Show wherein the author is misinformed.
  3. Show wherein the author is illogical.
  4. Show wherein the author’s analysis or account is incomplete.

Applying the first four rules of analytical reading help you to answer the first basic question you must ask about a book, namely, What is the book about as a whole? Similarly, applying the four rules for interpretation (rules 5 - 8) help you to answer the second question you must ask, namely, What is being said in detail, and how? The last seven rules (rules 9 - 15) of reading—the maxims of intellectual etiquette and the criteria for points of criticism—help you to answer the third and fourth basic questions you must ask. You will recall that those questions are: Is it true? And What of it?

You may also see how the fourth critical remark, namely, “show wherein the author’s analysis or account is incomplete”, ties together the three stages of analytical reading of any book. The last step of structural outlining is to know the problems that the author is trying to solve. The last step of interpretation is to know which of these problems the author solved and which he did not. The final step of criticism is the point about completeness. It touches structural outlining insofar as it considers how adequately the author has stated his problems, and interpretation insofar as it measures how satisfactorily he has solved them.

“What of it?”, “So what?”: Unless what you have read is true in some sense, you need go no further. But if it is, you must face the last question. You cannot read for information intelligently without determining what significance is, or should be, attached to the facts presented.

And if you are reading for enlightenment, there is really no end to the inquiry that, at every stage of learning, is renewed by the question, What of it? These four questions, as we have already pointed out, summarize all the obligations of a reader. The first three, moreover, correspond to something in the very nature of human discourse. If communications were not complex, structural outlining would be unnecessary. If language were a perfect medium instead of a relatively opaque one, there would be no need for interpretation. If error and ignorance did not circumscribe truth and knowledge, we should not have to be critical. The fourth question turns on the distinction between information and understanding. The fourth question is the meat of it. It is what will make you take action or modify action in the real world.

Stage I: Rules for finding what a book is about

  1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter.
  2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity.
  3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole.
  4. Define the problem or problems the author has tried to solve.
  • The inspectional reading you’ve done before will help you apply these rules.
  • These rules will help you answer the first basic question. See 4 basic questions section. Though you answered this in inspectional reading your answer will improve in accuracy as you proceed to apply the these rules and the following ones in Stage II
  • Their aim is to provide the reader who applies them with a knowledge of a book’s structure.

Classifying the Book (Rule 1)

You must know what kind of book you are reading, and you should know this as early in the process as possible, preferably before you begin to read analytically. This is because the types of questions you ask of different kinds of books and the way you answer them is different. A book on physics is approached differently than a book on morals. We have to modify the basic questions and how you answer them for each.

Also books differ in the kinds of knowledge they have to communicate, they proceed to instruct us differently; and, if we are to follow them, we must learn to read each kind in an appropriate manner.

How do you do so? By applying the rules in inspectional reading part I. See Types of Books section for most categories of book.

Knowing type of book also puts you on alert for what it is you’re looking for. If it’s a howto your focus would be on the steps and rules, if it’s math, your focus would be on proofs and their presentation.

What the Whole Book is About (Rule 2)

Note that the unity of a book is highly correlated with how well you enumerate its major parts (see next section), the two rules go hand in hand.

State the unity of the whole book in a single sentence, or at most a few sentences. Basically the theme or the main point.

There is only one way to know that you have succeeded. You must be able to tell yourself or anybody else what the unity is, and in a few words. (If it requires too many words, you have not seen the unity but a multiplicity.) Do not be satisfied with “feeling the unity” that you cannot express. The reader who says, “I know what it is, but I just can’t say it,” probably does not even fool himself.

How do you do so? By applying the rules in inspectional reading part II. Though it’ll change as you apply the subsequent rules below and in your analytical re-read.

Note: even if the author gives you the unity of his work, don’t use that as the unity we’re discussing here. We want your unity, the reader. The author’s unity is not the reader’s.

Examples of Unity:

Aristotle’s unity of Odyssey:

A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight; suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tossed, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them.

Unity of Tom Jones:

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. 8

The unity of Aristotle’s Ethics:

This is an inquiry into the nature of human happiness and an analysis of the conditions under which happiness may be gained or lost, with an indication of what men must do in their conduct and thinking in order to become happy or to avoid unhappiness, the principal emphasis being placed on the cultivation of the virtues, both moral and intellectual, although other goods are also recognized as necessary for happiness, such as wealth, health, friends, and a just society in which to live.

The The Wealth of Nations:

This is an inquiry into the source of national wealth in any economy that is built on a division of labor, considering the relation of the wages paid labor, the profits returned to capital, and the rent owed the landowner, as the prime factors in the price of commodities. It discusses the various ways in which capital can be more or less gainfully employed, and relates the origin and use of money to the accumulation and employment of capital. Examining the development of opulence in different nations and under different conditions, it compares the several systems of political economy, and argues for the beneficence of free trade.

Enumerate its Major Parts (Rule 3)

Set forth the major parts of the book, and show how these are organized into a whole, by being ordered to one another and to the unity of the whole.

You have not grasped a complex unity if all you know about it is how it is one. You must also know how it is many, not a many that consists of a lot of separate things, but an organized many. If the parts were not organically related, the whole that they composed would not be one. Strictly speaking, there would be no whole at all but merely a collection. Remember the house analogy.

A formula can be stated for operating according to this third rule. It will guide you in a general way. According to the second rule, we had to say: The whole book is about so and so and such and such. That done, we might obey the third rule by proceeding as follows: (1) The author accomplished this plan in five major parts, of which the first part is about so and so, the second part is about such and such, the third part is about this, the fourth part about that, and the fifth part about still another thing. (2) The first of these major parts is divided into three sections, of which the first considers X, the second considers Y, and the third considers Z. (3) In the first section of the first part, the author makes four points, of which the first is A, the second

Be careful in how far you go into this. Depending on what you want from the book, you might stop at a rough mental outline to a deep breakdown that goes down several levels. This could be abused to end being longer than the book. A good rule always describes the ideal performance. But a person can be skilled in an art without being the ideal artist. If you’ve got what you wanted from the breakdown, stop. Getting to the main arguments might be good enough.

Your outlines will probably not match the author’s chapter divisions. He did it in order to write the book. You’re doing it in order to read the book. Even if yours is not as good as his. But do use his titles, headings and subheadings as guides.

As you outline this book in analytical reading, your original unity that you wrote during inspectional reading (and outline) could change as your understanding deepens

Define Problem(s) Author Tried to Solve (Rule 4)

You should be able to state the main question that the book tries to answer, and you should be able to state the subordinate questions if the main question is complex and has many parts. Which are primary and which secondary? Which questions must be answered first, if others are to be answered later?

If you know the kinds of questions anyone can ask about anything, you will become adept in detecting an author’s problems.

Some theoretical questions:

  • Does something exist?
  • What kind of thing is it?
  • What caused it to exist, or under what conditions can it exist, or why does it exist?
  • What purpose does it serve?
  • What are the consequences of its existence?
  • What are its characteristic properties, its typical traits?
  • What are its relations to other things of a similar sort, or of a different sort?
  • How does it behave?

Some practical ones:

  • What ends should be sought?
  • What means should be chosen to a given end?
  • What things must one do to gain a certain objective, and in what order?
  • Under these conditions, what is the right thing to do, or the better rather than the worse?
  • Under what conditions would it be better to do this rather than that?

You’d have to adapt them for imaginative literature.

Stage II: Rules for interpreting a book’s contents

In Stage I we outlined the book structure, here we’ll interpret its contents or message. This stage will help us answer the second basic question (see basic questions section above): What is being said in detail, and how?

You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments (logical units or units of thought and knowledge) until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language. So long as words, sentences, and paragraphs (grammatical units) are opaque and unanalyzed, they are a barrier to, rather than a medium of, communication. You will read words but not receive knowledge.

  1. Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words.
  2. Grasp the author’s leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences.
  3. Know the author’s arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences.
  4. Determine which of his problems the author has solved, and which he has not; and of the latter, decide which the author knew he had failed to solve.

Come to Terms (Rule 5)

You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in a habit have such a large effect.

So we have two parts,

  1. Locate the important words, the words that make a difference.
  2. The second part is to determine the meaning of these words, as used, with precision.
Locate Keywords

Here are some ways to help you find keywords:

  • Words you don’t understand: These could be technical words or obscure words or words that seem not to make sense in a passage. If you find yourself not understanding a passage, it’s because there are words in there that haven’t come to terms with them. These could be your keywords. After you understand the passage (see below Finding Their Terms), you can identify the keywords. This sounds cyclical, but it works.
  • You know the word is a keyword and important to the author from your previous experience in the subject matter. Just mark it, no more work to do.
  • Author underlines, bolds, itilizes or marks the word for you.
  • He may call your attention to the word by explicitly discussing its various senses and indicating the way he is going to use it here and there. Or he may emphasize the word by defining the thing that the word is used to name.
  • Stage I could help here: If you know what kind of book it is, what it is about as a whole, and what its major parts are, you are greatly aided in separating the technical vocabulary from the ordinary words. The author’s title, chapter headings, and preface may be useful in this connection.

Mark these words. Using oasis, highlight them.

Finding Keyword Terms

Once you found the terms, now it’s time to find their meaning. How? You have to discover the meaning of a word you do not understand by using the meanings of all the other words in the context that you do understand. The process is something like the trial-and-error method of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Think of a definition in a dictionary, the word is explained by other words which you do understand.

Now that you know how to extract a meaning, you can follow this methodology; first, try to determine whether the word has one or many meanings. If it has many, try to see how they are related. Finally, note the places where the word is used in one sense or another, and see if the context gives you any clue to the reason for the shift in meaning. This last will enable you to follow the word in its change of meanings with the same flexibility that characterizes the author’s usage. Distinguish between the author’s vocabulary and his terminology. If you make a list in one column of the important words, and in another of their important meanings, you will see the relation between the vocabulary and the terminology.

Example of how one word can be the vehicle for many terms, and one term can be expressed by many words. For example by “reading” we may mean (1) reading to be entertained, (2) reading to get information, and (3) reading to achieve understanding. Now let us symbolize the word “reading” by the letter X, and the three meanings by the letters a, b, and c. If author wrote Xa, but you understood Xb, then you have not come to terms. Only when he wrote Xb and you understood it to mean Xb have come to terms. i.e. One to many. See synonyms below to see how we get into many to many.

Some things to keep in mind and watch out for:

  1. In the one to many paragraph above, we noted that the term could be Xa, or Xb or Xc. But it could also be Xabc to mean reading to be informed, entertained and enlightened and the other permutations, e.g. Xac, Xa, etc…
  2. There is the issue of synonyms. The author might use to avoid repetition and boring the reader. So now we could have two word X and Y with terms a, b, and c. We now have a many to many relationship. So Xa and Ya are different words representing the same term.
  3. Phrases might be used in place of words and like words, a phrase may refer to multiple terms. e.g. “reading for enlightenment” for the single word “reading.” and also “the process of passing from understanding less to understanding more by the operation of your mind upon a book.” All representing the term “analytical reading”. So we have a word, a short phrase and a larger phrase associated with one term.

You will end up here with two columns, one with key words (their synonyms and phrases) and the other with terms.

Grasp The Leading Propositions (Rule 6)

Mark the most important sentences in a book and discover the propositions they contain.

Propositions are the answers to questions. They are declarations of knowledge or opinion. That is why we call sentences that express them declarative, and distinguish sentences that ask questions as interrogative. Other sentences express wishes or intentions.

Unless you recognize the distinct propositions in a complicated9 sentence, you cannot make a discriminating judgment on what the writer is saying.

Sentences and propositions, like words and terms also have a many to many relationship.

Note: The rules about propositions and arguments are quite different when you are reading a poetical work—a novel, play, or poem.

Locating Key Sentences

Clues to important sentences:

  • Hard to understand sentences are likely to be key sentences. These are sentences that you have to read slowly and over again.
  • Major affirmations and denials author is making and the reasons he gives for doing so.
  • Authors help when they underline the sentences for you. They either tell you that this is an important point when they make it, or they use one or another typographical device to make their leading sentences stand out
  • The terms you highlighted in rule 5 are probably in key sentences (that step prepares for this one). Note that sometimes finding a key sentence helps you locate keywords. Both steps support each other.
  • They usually belong to the main argument of the book. They must be either premises or conclusions. Hence, if you can detect those sentences that seem to form a sequence, a sequence in which there is a beginning and an end, you probably have put your finger on the sentences that are important.
Finding Key Sentences’ Propositions

There are only two differences between finding the terms that words express and the propositions that sentences express. One is that you employ a larger context in the latter case. You bring all the surrounding sentences to bear on the sentence in question, just as you used the surrounding words to interpret a particular word. In both cases, you proceed from what you do understand to the gradual elucidation of what is at first relatively unintelligible.

The other difference lies in the fact that complicated sentences usually express more than one proposition. You have not completed your interpretation of an important sentence until you have separated out of it all the different, though perhaps related, propositions. Example:

A prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and from their women.

This sentence expresses two propositions at least: (1) the reason why the prince ought to inspire fear in a certain way is that he can endure being feared so long as he is not hated; (2) he can avoid being hated only by keeping his hands off the property of his citizens and their women.

You need to verify that you understand the author’s proposition. You do so by applying the following two rules:

  1. State the proposition(s) in a sentence in your own words. If you cannot get away from using his words, then you know his words, but not his mind. He was trying to communicate knowledge, and all you received was words.
  2. Can you point to some experience you have had that the proposition describes or to which the proposition is in any way relevant? Can you exemplify the general truth that has been enunciated by referring to a particular instance of it? To imagine a possible case is often as good as citing an actual one. If you cannot you should suspect that you do not know what is being said. Propositions do not exist in a vacuum. They refer to the world in which we live. Unless you can show some acquaintance with actual or possible facts to which the proposition refers or is relevant somehow, you are playing with words, not dealing with thought and knowledge.

Finding or Constructing Arguments (Rule 7)

If the book contains arguments, you must know what they are, and be able to put them into a nutshell. Any good argument can be put into a nutshell.

Find if you can the paragraphs in a book that state its important arguments; but if the arguments are not thus expressed, your task is to construct them, by taking a sentence from this paragraph, and one from that, until you have gathered together the sequence of sentences that state the propositions that compose the argument. See Note taking section for how to note sentences of an argument that don’t happen to follow one another.

This logical unit is not uniquely related to any recognizable unit of writing, as terms are related to words and phrases, and propositions to sentences. An argument may be expressed in a single complicated sentence. Or it may be expressed in a number of sentences that are only part of one paragraph. Sometimes an argument may coincide with a paragraph, but it may also happen that an argument runs through several or many paragraphs.

Every line of argument, in other words, must start somewhere. Basically, there are two ways or places in which it can start: with assumptions agreed on between writer and reader, or with what are called self-evident propositions, which neither the writer nor reader can deny. In the first case, the assumptions can be anything, so long as agreement exists. In the second case, examples like “The whole is greater than its parts”, i.e. self evident.

There are many paragraphs in any book that do not express an argument at all—perhaps not even part of one. It hardly needs to be said that they should be read rather quickly.

Helpful things to keep in mind for this rule:

  • Remember that every argument must involve a number of statements. Of these, some give the reasons why you should accept a conclusion the author is proposing. If you find the conclusion first, then look for the reasons. If you find the reasons first, see where they lead.
  • Discriminate between the kind of argument that points to one or more particular facts as evidence for some generalization and the kind that offers a series of general statements to prove some further generalizations. The former kind of reasoning is usually referred to as inductive, the latter as deductive; but the names are not what is important. What is important is the ability to discriminate between the two 10. Inductive have a potential of not being true (black swans don’t exist because all the swans I ever saw are white).
  • Observe what things the author says he must assume, what he says can be proved or otherwise evidenced, and what need not be proved because it is self-evident.

Determine Solved & Unsolved Questions (Rule 8)

Find out what the author’s solutions are. When you have applied this rule, and the three that precede it in interpretive reading, you can feel reasonably sure that you have managed to understand the book. This rule, #8, ties together the first stage of analytical reading (outlining the structure) and the second stage (interpreting the contents).

In Rule 4, we stated the questions and problems the author has attempted to answer and solve. Here, in rule 8 we’re concerned with which of them did he succeed in solving? In the course of solving these, did he raise any new ones? Of the problems that he failed to solve, old or new, which did the author himself know he had failed on?

The two processes in Stage I and Stage II that we have done thus far, outlining and interpretation, meet at the level of propositions and arguments. You work down to propositions and arguments by dividing the book into its parts. You work up to arguments by seeing how they are composed of propositions and ultimately of terms. When you have completed the two processes, you can really say that you know the contents of a book.

What to do here: Update the questions and problems in Rule 4 with your findings.

Stage III: Rules for criticizing a book as a communication of knowledge

Here you will reap the reward of all your previous efforts.

Reading a book is a kind of conversation. You may think it is not conversation at all, because the author does all the talking and you have nothing to say. If you think that, you do not realize your full obligation as a reader—and you are not grasping your opportunities.

A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.

But you also have the responsibility of taking a position. When you take it, it is yours, not the author’s. To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. Note the tendency to take a popular or good book and assume the author’s message a truth.

Thus you see how the three arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric11 cooperate in regulating the elaborate processes of writing and reading. Skill in the first two stages of analytical reading comes from a mastery of grammar and logic. Skill in the third stage depends on the remaining art. The rules of this stage of reading rest on the principles of rhetoric, conceived in the broadest sense.

The concept has three main classical components: Ethos: Appeals to the credibility or authority of the speaker/writer Pathos: Appeals to the audience’s emotions Logos: Appeals to logic and reason In practice, rhetoric involves the strategic use of various techniques like: Word choice and arrangement Figurative language (metaphors, analogies) Understanding and adapting to your audience Timing and delivery Argument structure and organization

On the part of the speaker or writer, rhetorical skill is knowing how to convince or persuade. Since this is the ultimate end in view, all the other aspects of communication must serve it. Grammatical and logical skill in writing clearly and intelligibly has merit in itself, but it is also a means to an end. Reciprocally, on the part of the reader or listener, rhetorical skill is knowing how to react to anyone who tries to convince or persuade us. Here, too, grammatical and logical skill, which enables us to understand what is being said, prepares the way for a critical reaction. If we are not privy to rhetoric, we could get swept away by the author without realizing it.

This means, in effect, that the third stage of analytical reading must always follow the other two in time. The first two stages interpenetrate each other. Even the beginning reader can combine them somewhat, and the expert combines them almost completely. He can discover the contents of a book by breaking down the whole into its parts and at the same time constructing the whole out of its elements of thought and knowledge, its terms, propositions, and arguments. Furthermore, even for the beginner, a certain amount of the work required at those two stages can be performed during a good inspectional reading. But the expert no less than the beginner must wait until he understands before he starts to criticize.

A. General Maxims of Intellectual Etiquette

The first requires the reader to complete the task of understanding before rushing in. The second adjures him not to be disputatious or contentious. The third asks him to view disagreement about matters of knowledge as being generally remediable. This rule goes further: It also commands him to give reasons for his disagreements so that issues are not merely stated but also defined. In that lies all hope for resolution.

  1. Do not begin criticism until you have completed your outline and your interpretation of the book. (Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment, until you can say “I understand.”)
  2. Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously.
  3. Demonstrate that you recognize the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting good reasons for any critical judgment you make.
Do not criticize Until You Understand (Rule 9)

You must be able to say, with reasonable certainty, “I understand,” before you can say any one of the following things: “I agree,” or “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.” These three remarks exhaust all the critical positions you can take. We hope you have not made the error of supposing that to criticize is always to disagree. That is a popular misconception. To agree is just as much an exercise of critical judgment on your part as to disagree. You can be just as wrong in agreeing as in disagreeing. To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent. Though it may not be so obvious at first, suspending judgment is also an act of criticism. It is taking the position that something has not been shown. You are saying that you are not convinced or persuaded one way or the other.

Do not begin to talk back until you have listened carefully and are sure you understand. Not until you are honestly satisfied that you have accomplished the first two stages of reading should you feel free to express yourself. When you have, you not only have earned the right to turn critic, you also have the duty to do so.

“I don’t know what you mean, but I think you’re wrong.” There is actually no point in answering critics of this sort. The only polite thing to do is to ask them to state your position for you, the position they claim to be challenging. If they cannot do it satisfactorily, if they cannot repeat what you have said in their own words, you know that they do not understand, and you are entirely justified in ignoring their criticisms. They are irrelevant, as all criticism must be that is not based on understanding. When you find the rare person who shows that he understands what you are saying as well as you do, then you can delight in his agreement or be seriously disturbed by his dissent.

To say “I don’t understand” is, of course, also a critical judgment, but only after you have tried your hardest does it reflect on the book rather than yourself. If you have done everything that can be expected of you and still do not understand, it may be because the book is unintelligible. When you say “I don’t understand,” watch your tone of voice. Be sure it concedes the possibility that it may not be the author’s fault.

Note that sometimes to understand another you must have read his prerequisite work. Those who judge Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason without reading his Critique of Practical Reason, or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations without reading his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, or The Communist Manifesto without Marx’s Capital, are more likely than not to be agreeing or disagreeing with something they do not fully understand.

Do not be Disputatious (Rule 10)

When you disagree, do so reasonably, and not disputatiously or contentiously.

You’re not here to win arguments. You’re here to gain knowledge and to learn the truth. He who regards conversation as a battle can win only by being an antagonist, only by disagreeing successfully, whether he is right or wrong. You win only by gaining knowledge, not by knocking the other fellow down.

Whether you agree or disagree or suspend judgement, you should be motivated by one consideration alone—the facts, the truth about the case.

You should not feel pressured to agree with an author or the other way around. Criticize, but with respect. If you have a hard time doing so then your problem is emotional rather than intellectual.

Knowledge vs. Personal Opinion (Rule 11)

Respect the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by giving reasons for any critical judgment you make.

He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another. He should always keep before him the possibility that he misunderstands or that he is ignorant on some point. No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught. The trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine, and you have yours; and our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property. On such a view, communication cannot be profitable if the profit to be gained is an increase in knowledge.

The reader who does not distinguish between the reasoned statement of knowledge and the flat expression of opinion is not reading to learn. He is at most interested in the author’s personality and is using the book as a case history. Such a reader will, of course, neither agree nor disagree. He does not judge the book but the man. If, however, the reader is primarily interested in the book and not the man, he should take his critical obligations seriously. These involve applying the distinction between real knowledge and mere opinion to himself as well as to the author. Thus the reader must do more than make judgments of agreement or disagreement. He must give reasons for them.

Incidentally, we would not want to be understood as claiming that there is a great deal of “absolute” knowledge available to men. Self-evident propositions, in the sense in which we defined them in the previous chapter, seem to us to be both indemonstrable and undeniable truths. Most knowledge, however, lacks that degree of absoluteness. What we know, we know subject to correction; we know it because all, or at least the weight, of the evidence supports it, but we are not and cannot be certain that new evidence will not sometime invalidate what we now believe is true.

This, however, does not remove the important distinction between knowledge and opinion that we have been stressing. Knowledge, if you please, consists in those opinions that can be defended, opinions for which there is evidence of one kind or another. If we really know something, in this sense, we must believe that we can convince others of what we know. Opinion, in the sense in which we have been employing the word, is unsupported judgment. That is why we have employed the modifiers “mere” or “personal” in conjunction with it. We can do no more than opine that something is true when we have no evidence or reason for the statement other than our personal feeling or prejudice. We can say that it is true and that we know it when we have objective evidence that other reasonable men are likely to accept.

B. Special Criteria for Points of Criticism

The first thing a reader can say is that he understands or that he does not. In fact, he must say he understands, in order to say more. If he does not understand, he should keep his peace and go back to work on the book.

There is one exception to the harshness of the second alternative. “I don’t understand” may itself be a critical remark. To make it so, the reader must be able to support it. If the fault is with the book rather than himself, the reader must locate the sources of trouble. He should be able to show that the structure of the book is disorderly, that its parts do not hang together, that some of it lacks relevance, or, perhaps, that the author equivocates in the use of important words, with a whole train of consequent confusions. To the extent that a reader can support his charge that the book is unintelligible, he has no further critical obligations.

Let us suppose that you are finally able to say “I understand.” If, in addition to understanding the book, you agree thoroughly with what the author says, the work is over. The analytical reading is completely done. You have been enlightened, and convinced or persuaded. It is clear that we have additional steps to consider only in the case of disagreement or suspended judgment. The former is the more usual case. (With agreement you still have to answer ‘What of it?’)

If the reader understands a book, how can he disagree with it? Critical reading demands that he make up his own mind. But his mind and the author’s have become as one through his success in understanding the book. What mind has he left to make up independently? There are some people who make the error that causes this apparent difficulty: they fail to distinguish between two senses of “agreement.” In consequence, they wrongly suppose that where there is understanding between men, disagreement is impossible. They say that all disagreement is simply owing to misunderstanding. The error in this becomes obvious as soon as we remember that the author is making judgments about the world in which we live. He claims to be giving us theoretical knowledge about the way things exist and behave, or practical knowledge about what should be done. Obviously, he can be either right or wrong. His claim is justified only to the extent that he speaks truly, to the extent that he says what is probable in the light of evidence. Otherwise, his claim is unfounded.

These three conditions are, ideally, the sine qua non of intelligent and profitable conversation. On the involvement of emotions with disagreement: You disagree because you think the author can be shown to be wrong on some point. You are not simply voicing your prejudice or expressing your emotions. Because this is true, then, from an ideal point of view, there are three conditions that must be satisfied if controversy is to be well conducted:

  1. Since men are animals as well as rational, it is necessary to acknowledge the emotions you bring to a dispute, or those that arise in the course of it. Otherwise you are likely to be giving vent to feelings, not stating reasons. You may even think you have reasons, when all you have are strong feelings.
  2. Second, you must make your own assumptions explicit. You must know what your prejudices—that is, your prejudgments—are. Otherwise you are not likely to admit that your opponent may be equally entitled to different assumptions. Good controversy should not be a quarrel about assumptions. If an author, for example, explicitly asks you to take something for granted, the fact that the opposite can also be taken for granted should not prevent you from honoring his request. If your prejudices lie on the opposite side, and if you do not acknowledge them to be prejudices, you cannot give the author’s case a fair hearing.
  3. Third and finally, an attempt at impartiality is a good antidote for the blindness that is almost inevitable in partisanship. Controversy without partisanship is, of course, impossible. But to be sure that there is more light in it, and less heat, each of the disputants should at least try to take the other fellow’s point of view. If you have not been able to read a book sympathetically, your disagreement with it is probably more contentious than civil.

If you have not been able to show that the author is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical on relevant matters, you simply cannot disagree. You must agree. You cannot say, as so many students and others do, “I find nothing wrong with your premises, and no errors in reasoning, but I don’t agree with your conclusions.” All you can possibly mean by saying something like that is that you do not like the conclusions. You are not disagreeing. You are expressing your emotions or prejudices. If you have been convinced, you should admit it. (If, despite your failure to support one or more of these three critical points, you still honestly feel unconvinced, perhaps you should not have said you understood in the first place.) The first three remarks are related to the author’s terms, propositions, and arguments. These are the elements he used to solve the problems that initiated his efforts. The fourth remark—that the book is incomplete—bears on the structure of the whole.

After you can say I understand but I disagree, you may show your disagreement with the following maxims, (these are not mutual exclusive, a work could suffer from one or more of them):

  1. Show wherein the author is uninformed.
  2. Show wherein the author is misinformed.
  3. Show wherein the author is illogical.
  4. Show wherein the author’s analysis or account is incomplete.
Show wherein the author is uninformed (Rule 12)

He lacks some piece of knowledge that is relevant to the problem he is trying to solve. To support the remark, you must be able yourself to state the knowledge that the author lacks and show how it is relevant, how it makes a difference to his conclusions.

Show wherein the author is misinformed (Rule 13)

He asserts what is not the case. His error here may be owing to lack of knowledge, but the error is more than that. Whatever its cause, it consists in making assertions contrary to fact. The author is proposing as true or more probable what is in fact false or less probable. He is claiming to have knowledge he does not possess. This kind of defect should be pointed out, of course, only if it is relevant to the author’s conclusions. And to support the remark you must be able to argue the truth or greater probability of a position contrary to the author’s.

Whenever a man is misinformed in a certain respect, he is also uninformed in the same respect.

Show wherein the author is illogical (Rule 14)

To say that an author is illogical is to say that he has committed a fallacy in reasoning. In general, fallacies are of two sorts. There is the non sequitur, which means that what is drawn as a conclusion simply does not follow from the reasons offered. And there is the occurrence of inconsistency, which means that two things the author has tried to say are incompatible. To make either of these criticisms, the reader must be able to show the precise respect in which the author’s argument lacks cogency12.

“I recommend setting up a star chart system where children earn points toward a weekly prize for completing their homework and chores.”

Show wherein the author’s analysis or account is incomplete (Rule 15)

Author has not solved all the problems he started with, or that he has not made as good a use of his materials as possible, that he did not see all their implications and ramifications, or that he has failed to make distinctions that are relevant to his undertaking. It is not enough to say that a book is incomplete. Anyone can say that of any book. Men are finite, and so are their works, every last one. There is no point in making this remark, therefore, unless the reader can define the inadequacy precisely, either by his own efforts as a knower or through the help of other books.

This fourth point is strictly not a basis for disagreement. It is critically adverse only to the extent that it marks the limitations of the author’s achievement. A reader who agrees with a book in part—because he finds no reason to make any of the other points of adverse criticism—may, nevertheless, suspend judgment on the whole, in the light of this fourth point about the book’s incompleteness. Suspended judgment on the reader’s part responds to an author’s failure to solve his problems perfectly.

You may see how the fourth critical remark ties together the three stages of analytical reading of any book. The last step of structural outlining is to know the problems that the author is trying to solve. The last step of interpretation is to know which of these problems the author solved and which he did not. The final step of criticism is the point about completeness. It touches structural outlining insofar as it considers how adequately the author has stated his problems, and interpretation insofar as it measures how satisfactorily he has solved them.

Syntopical Reading

The reading of two or more books on the same subject. This implies that the subject must be define before reading, but it’s actually the case, that the subject is defined after the reading in the first stage of this level. Take the subjects of love or progress as examples. You might have to read dozens of books before the subject is clear. Love and progress have many definitions and variations and finding the right books on the specific definition that you’re trying to solve for requires that you read. This is where your skill as an inspectional reader comes in. You’ll be able to inspect a book and decide whether it tackles the subject matter that you’re interested in.

The aim of analytical reading applies to the reading and understanding of a single book. The book is your master. In syntopical reading it’s the reverse, it is you and your concerns that are primarily to be served, not the books that you read. You are the master.

When you’re done with syntopical reading, you will not have found an answer to your problem. You will have found discussions of it by different authors. In their agreement and their disagreement about the issues, you’ll get new insights that you didn’t have before, but not solutions or answers. If you’re successful, you’ll have more questions and a deeper understanding of the issue.

It follows then that you must maintain absolute (as humanly possible) objectivity and always refer to the author’s text along with your conclusions otherwise, you’ll be just another voice in the discussion. Look at all sides and take no sides.

Syntopical Steps

Stage I: Surveying the Field

  1. Find the right books on the subject you’re interested it through syntopicon, librarians, references, experts in the field
  2. Using inspectional reading, confirm whether the books actually treat your subject matter or question and also to clarify your idea of the subject. The more you inspect the clearer the subject becomes. Your subject might not be clear before this step.

Stage II: Syntopical Reading

  1. Finding the relevant passages: do another inspectional read and note the relevant passages in the books that you will return to to read analytically. This step cannot be combined with the analytical read you did in stage I to include the book on the list. No matter your level of expertise.
  2. Bringing the authors to terms: you may not depend on the terms the authors use. Here you’ll have to construct your own neutral terms and link each author’s different use of keywords to them. This requires laser eyes to see beyond the language and into the terms. Subtly different words referring to the same terms.
  3. Getting the questions clear: as you read analytically the passages, you’ll create questions that two or more of the others are answering. Sometimes without them knowing that they’re treating the question.
  4. Defining the issues: group the issues that the answers to the questions highlight. Order them in such a way that throw the most light on the issue. More general at the top, then the most specific ones. Here, your work will start taking shape.
  5. Analyzing the discussion: show where each of the authors stand on the issues and how they think and treat each. Here you the discussion to tackle your questions.

Adapting the Analytical Rules

It is important to note here that the fifteen rules of analytical reading, in the form in which they were presented above, do not apply to the reading of fiction and poetry. And even for expository works, they must be looked at differently for each type of book: focus on one rule more than the other, reword a rule, etc…

The outlining of the structure of an imaginative work is a different matter from the outlining of an expository book. Novels and plays and poems do not proceed by terms, propositions, and arguments—their fundamental content, in other words, is not logical, and the criticism of such works is based on different premises. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that no rules at all apply to reading imaginative literature.

Practical Books

Questions that every practical book will have

  1. What are the author’s objectives? (Rule 4 adapted)
  2. What means for achieving them is he proposing? (Rule 8 adapted)

Two types of practical books

  1. Rule book (like this one)
    • How To, Guides, Manuals, etc…
    • Easy to spot the propositions. They’re usually in the imperative.
  2. Principles book
    • books in economics, politics, and morals
    • You’ll have to deduce your own rules from the principles and apply them in the read world
    • Must read between the lines to generate rules
    • Must know it’s a practical book or you’ll read it incorrectly

The most important thing to remember about any practical book is that it can never solve the practical problems with which it is concerned. A theoretical book can solve its own problems. But a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. Your action.

The practical author can give rules that they think will work for you, but it is you the reader in your own world and your own situation that must apply them. So you’ll have to use your judgement in applying the author’s rules or recommended actions and modifying them to suite your needs. He can never know what’s right for you.

A rule of conduct is practically true on two conditions: one is that it works; the other is that its working leads you to the right end, an end you rightly desire. Even if you think it works, but don’t agree or are not interested in the end that it leads to, then the book has little practical use for you.

The practical author has to be a propagandist to convince you of the goals he’s proposing that you achieve. That’s OK, as long as you’re aware of the propaganda. What enters the heart without first going through the mind will come back at you and put the mind out of commission. Allow him to appeal to your emotions (thought -> emotion -> action, beware when the thought step is skipped) when your goals are aligned with his. It becomes motivation, not manipulation in that case.

Imaginative Literature

Expository works try to convey knowledge, while imaginative ones try to communicate experience itself. The former appeals to our judgement and reasoning while the latter to our senses and imagination.

A work of fine art is fine not because it is refined or finished, but because it is an end in itself. It is its own excuse for being.

In expository works, you work on the book. In imaginative you let the book work on you.

  • Don’t try to resist the effect an imaginative work has on you: Let it work on you and take you over.
  • Don’t look for terms, propositions and arguments: Look for characters, events, plots, worlds.
  • Don’t criticize fiction by the standards of truth and consistency that properly apply to communication of knowledge: enter the author’s world and only critique it based on its own rules, not the real world’s rules.
  • Structural analogue:
    1. Classify as lyric, novel or play. A play differs from a novel in how it narrates entirely by means of actions and speeches. The playwrite can never speak in hi own person as the novelist can.
    2. The unity of a story is always in its plot. You should be able to summarize the plot
    3. The parts follow a temporal scheme that have a beginning, middle and end, so you must be able to state those. Beginning doesn’t necessarily start at the beginning of the book. You can’t pull out section and chapters as you can in expository works.
  • Interpretive analogue:
    1. The terms of a fiction are its characters and events.
    2. The propositions are is the background against which the characters and events take place. Here, you job is to live in this background as if you were a contemporary of these characters.
    3. Follow the actions and arguments of the characters in this artificial world to which you belong and be able to state from the points of views of the characters why they did what the did.
  • Critical analogue: don’t criticize imaginative writing until you fully appreciate what the author has tried to make you experience. Here you don’t say you agree or disagree or suspend judgement, but instead you say I like it because or I don’t like it because…

Stories

  • Try to read the story or novel as fast as possible. In one sitting if possible, otherwise the plot will escape you. Quickly, but with total immersion and actively. Remember the four basic questions.
  • Don’t be anxious about complex novels (if they’re good) with many characters. As you read it, the important characters and events will become more visible and the unimportant ones will fade into the background. Imagine moving into a new town, how everyone is a stranger, but little by little, neighbors start to emerge, friends start become more visible and events more regular. At first it was overwhelming, but then it becomes part of your world.

Other Types

I did not take notes about how to read other types of books. I’ll do so when I read those genres. Currently my reading is limited to practical books and novels (some stories) so I just took notes on those.

Types of Books

  • Expository
    • Theoretical: that something is the case (it is the case that).
      • History: narration of past events and their place.
        • Biographies and Auto Biographies
        • Current Events
      • Science: things outside the scope of your normal, routine, daily experience. Lab.
      • Classical Scientific Books
      • Mathematics
      • Philosophy: experiences that are common to all.
      • Popular Science
      • Social Science
    • Practical: how to do something (should, ought, good, bad, ends and means).
      • Guidebooks
      • Art to be learned
      • Manuals
      • Engineering
      • Medicine
      • Cooking
      • Economics
      • Ethics
      • Political
  • Imaginative
    • Stories (includes novels)
    • Epics
    • Plays
    • Tragedy
    • Lyric Poetry

Insights

  • Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.
  • They body is limited and declines after 30. The mind keeps growing indefinitely. But it can atrophy like the muscles if it is not constantly growing intellectually, morally and spiritually. When it ceases to grow, we begin to die.
  • The person who has had one experience in acquiring a complex skill knows that he need not fear the array of rules that present themselves at the beginning of something new to be learned. He knows that he does not have to worry about how all the separate acts in which he must become separately proficient are going to work together. The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not a plurality of distinct habits. The parts coalesce and telescope as each reaches the stage of automatic execution. When all the subordinate acts can be done more or less automatically, you have formed the habit of the whole performance. Then you can think about tackling an expert run you have never skied before, or reading a book that you once thought was too difficult for you. At the beginning, the learner pays attention to himself and his skill in the separate acts. When the acts have lost their separateness in the skill of the whole performance, the learner can at last pay attention to the goal that the technique he has acquired enables him to reach.
  • We are discussing here the virtue of teachability—a virtue that is almost always misunderstood. Teachability is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgment. He can be trained, perhaps, but not taught. The most teachable reader is, therefore, the most critical. He is the reader who finally responds to a book by the greatest effort to make up his own mind on the matters the author has discussed.
  • Any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed the habit of operating according to its rules.
  • Classes of books13:
    • [one chapter books] 99% of all books ever written can be satisfied with an inspectional reading.
    • [hard books] 0.01% of books make severe demands on you, but you may reach their level after your first analytical read. You only return to them to refresh your memory. You might feel that they still have something to offer, but on returning you might be surprised to learn that you’re its match or have gone beyond it.
    • [desert island books] 0.001% of all books will never be grasped by you. Each analytical read will stretch you more. Seek them out! You’ll keep returning to these books and keep learning.
  • Only books that are beyond you will improve your analytical reading skill and will expand your wisdom. Informative books cause a quantitative change in information in you, but no improvement in how you think about things.
  • To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
  • Beware of the illusion that you’re using your mind when you’re just reacting to stimuli and hording information: documentaries, amusement, online courses, media, etc…
  • The reader tries to uncover the skeleton that the book conceals. The author starts with the skeleton and tries to cover it up.
  • The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not mean that they read all the books that, in their day, were listed as the indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in most of our colleges, but what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. They were entitled to become authorities in their own right. In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author.

Note Taking

All that follow are suggestions.

  • Using Kindle Oasis, we can adapt author’s suggestion of taking notes.
  • When you want to read a book again, it’s preferable to save all previous notes, delete them and start taking notes over again. Otherwise, former notes will be in your way and distraction from your next reading.

Inspectional/Structural

Take notes that help answer the first 3 questions in Analytical Stage I or first question of the four basic question.

Analytical/Conceptual

These notes help you with interpreting the content of the book. Here are some suggestions. Use these for inspection if you deem fit.

UNDERLINING—of major points; of important or forceful statements.

BOOKMARK PAGE & WRITE “MP” NEXT TO A MAJOR POINT—to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or dozen most important statements or passages in the book. You will be able to take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it to the bookmarked pages, refresh your recollection. Do not bookmark pages for other purposes.

NUMBERS IN THE MARGIN & HIGHLIGHT SENTENCE—to indicate a sequence of points made by the author in developing an argument. Maybe an argument’s keyword to remember which argument the propositions are referring to. e.g. “Love is life argument”, you’d note “LIL p3” for love is life proposition 3.

HIGHLIGHT KEYWORDS- to indicate a keyword (term). So highlighting is used for keywords and key sentences that lead to arguments. Keyword -> Key sentence -> Argument.

HIGHLIGHTED SENTENCES WITHOUT NUMBERS- are key sentences, but not necessarily part of a larger argument. They might be the complete argument.

WRITING IN THE MARGIN, OR AT THE TOP OR BOTTOM OF THE PAGE—

  • to record questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raises in your mind;
  • to reduce a complicated discussion to a simple statement;
  • to record the sequence of major points right through the book.

PERSONAL INDEX- Add a canvas on the endpapers at the back of the book and use it to make a personal index of the author’s points in the order of their appearance. You can extract those from highlighted sentences in the book. With and without numbers in the margin.

WEB PAGE FOR THE BOOK- After finishing the book and making your personal index on the back endpapers, create a webpage on your site, nashkabbara.com, and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (you have already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic outline and an order of parts. That outline will be the measure of your understanding of the work; It will express your intellectual ownership of the book.

Syntopical

You’ll probably have to use an external notebooks since your notes will be referencing multiple books.

  1. you must distinguish between a bad book and one that is over your head. They’re both hard to read. There are, of course, many books worth reading well. There is a much larger number that should be only inspected. To become well-read, in every sense of the word, one must know how to use whatever skill one possesses with discrimination—by reading every book according to its merits. ↩

  2. Many persons believe that they know how to read because they read at different speeds. But they pause and go slow over the wrong sentences. They pause over the sentences that interest them rather than the ones that puzzle them. Indeed, this is one of the greatest obstacles to reading a book that is not completely contemporary. Any old book contains facts that are somewhat surprising because they are different from what we know. But when you are reading for understanding it is not that kind of novelty that you are seeking. ↩

  3. you’ll naturally be faster than in inspectional here, because you keep going even if you didn’t understand much at a slower rate of reading. ↩

  4. If you’re reading for diversion or data, you could assume you’re in elementary. ↩

  5. See Inspection/Structural notes section. ↩

  6. These rules describes an ideal performance. Few people have ever read any book in this ideal manner, and those who have, probably read very few books this way. The ideal remains, however, the measure of achievement. You are a good reader to the degree in which you approximate it. When we speak of someone as “well-read,” we should have this ideal in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. ↩

  7. See learning under insights section. At first, you maybe have to reread and apply different sections, but that should diminish as you get more skilled. ↩

  8. That, indeed, is the plot of every romance. To recognize this is to learn what it means to say that there are only a small number of plots in the world. ↩

  9. A compound sentence for example which is a collection of sentences, connected by such words as “and,” or “if . . . then,” or “not only . . . but also.” ↩

  10. Deductive reasoning moves from general principles to specific conclusions. It starts with a general rule and applies it to a specific case to reach a logically certain conclusion (assuming the premises are true): General rule: All mammals give birth -> Specific case: Dogs are mammals -> Conclusion: Therefore, dogs give birth. Inductive reasoning works in the opposite direction - it moves from specific observations to general conclusions. It uses patterns in specific cases to form broader generalizations, though these conclusions are probable rather than certain: Observation 1: My dog Spot wags his tail when he’s happy -> Observation 2: My neighbor’s dog Rex wags his tail when he’s happy -> Observation 3: The dogs at the park wag their tails when they’re happy -> General conclusion: Dogs probably wag their tails when they’re happy. Key distinction: Deductive reasoning, if valid and based on true premises, leads to conclusions that must be true. Inductive reasoning leads to conclusions that are probably true but could potentially be false even if all the observations are accurate. ↩

  11. Rhetoric is the art of effective or persuasive speaking and writing. It’s a systematic approach to communication that focuses on how to convince or influence others through language. ↩

  12. non sequitur (it does not follow): “John is tall. Therefore, he must be good at basketball.” An example of an inconsistency: An author writes in a parenting advice article: “Parents should never use rewards to motivate children because external motivation damages intrinsic drive and creates dependency. Children should learn to be self-motivated.” Then later in the same article writes: ↩

  13. ‘one chapter books’ refers to books that could have been written in one chapter. ‘desert island books’ are one of the ten books that you’d take with you to a desert island. ↩