How to Read, Part 1
This is the first part of a draft of a new section I’m going to add to How to Make Notes and Write, which will deal with the basics of the type of reading I typically do in my own studies, that I teach my students in my university history courses. It’s a first pass, so I’ll probably revise it quite a bot over the course of the summer. I’ll continue with regular installments in this “How To” section of the blog.
How to Read
Often when teachers give advice about a very broad topic like this one, they cast too wide a net and try to say something general enough that it will help all readers or appeal to the widest possible audience. I'm going to try to avoid that by separating my advice into a bunch of short sections. As you'll see, I'm also going to talk about when to skim texts and when to read them closely and carefully. So I'm going to give you clear indications of what is in each section of the text, so you can choose which to skim through and which to spend time with.
Another text on reading that I like quite a bit (Mortimer Adler's and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book) spends a bit of time distinguishing between books that are designed to communicate practical information (how to do something) and others that want to impart wisdom or exhort the reader to adopt a particular worldview or morality. Adler tries to do a bit of both, imparting practical advice about the processes of analytical reading but also convincing his readers that (and why) they should try to do it. I'm going to assume you, my reader, have already chosen to read more analytically and critically; so I'm not going to preach to the converted. Maybe you are hoping to continue educating yourself by reading. Maybe you've been assigned a text or a research project and you want to make the best use of your time and energy. Maybe you have other reasons to be reading this. In any case, I'm going to assume in this book that I don't need to convince you that reading, making notes, and writing are a good idea. I'll get right to the techniques.
Sometimes we read Great Books that we want to savor for their beauty and in which we expect to find wisdom or a message that we want to understand fully. Since Great Books are those that have stood the test of time, these texts are often quite old. They may have been written or their stories may be set in times and places that are quite outside our normal daily experience. These are the types of books we may want to read just to appreciate their richness; or we may be hoping to learn from authors who have been acclaimed as masters of their fields. We may want to read slowly and soak up each word, phrase, setting, description, plot point, and idea we encounter. We may also be interested in understanding how these acknowledged classics influenced readers before us and helped shape the cultures that valued them. This type of interest may call for a more active, comparative style of reading, much like what I'll consider next.
Often when we are not reading the classics (and I suspect even sometimes when we are), we are seeking information rather than a complete and thorough understanding of the message or moral or argument of a particular book. Often this means we're reading in a book rather than reading cover-to-cover. Even when we read an entire book, we are often not expecting to be convinced by an author or to radically change the way we understand the world. Most of us have a pretty well-established worldview, which we may have built up deliberately by reading, learning, and introspection; or which we may have accumulated more passively just by growing up in a community and being exposed to day-to-day life. The point is, in most cases we're not going to have our understanding of the world and our place in it completely overturned by reading a book. And we're typically not seeking that when we open its cover or turn to a screen.
So what are we doing, most of the time when we read, and how can we improve it? The next section will focus on the techniques I use to explore texts and make them part of my own learning. They apply equally to fuller readings of Great Books, I think. But they're particularly useful for adding information from less exalted sources as well, to build your own structure of knowledge.
Level One: Basic Reading Techniques
Something that readers with less experience writing don't always consider is the process the author used to create the text they're reading. I find it very helpful to imagine that I'm in a conversation with the authors of books. They are trying to communicate something with me; something they felt strongly enough about that they went to the trouble of writing a book! I've done this myself and I can attest that it takes some dedication and commitment to the content to devote months or years of work to it. Knowing this helps me be aware that in nearly all cases, authors are doing their very best to communicate their ideas to me as completely and in as straightforward a manner as they can. They want to be understood; that's the point of communication.
This doesn't mean that their ideas might not be complicated. It might take some work to follow the author's train of thought or understand all the nuances of the examples, evidence, assumptions, caveats, exceptions, and all the other elements of an argument. Or the metaphors, allusions, and tropes of a narrative. But it does suggest that to the best of their ability, authors are trying to make their attempt at communication as inviting and accessible as they can. So we can use our understanding of the basic structures of writing and the tools and techniques the authors had at their disposal, to interrogate their books.
I'm going to assume you are more-or-less familiar with the basic elements of grammar. We'll spend a bit more time on them in the writing section later in the book, because you'll want to be a bit more than familiar when it's your turn to use these tools. But for now I'm going to imagine you understand the way words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs work to express ideas. Words are the basic building blocks and as they are strung together into larger structures, ideas can be expressed with more detail and precision. These are the structures we'll be working with as we read.
You may have heard it said that paragraphs are the basic units of thought. This is because they are typically used to make a single point. In the past, authors used to write paragraphs that went on for pages, but today each paragraph it typically shorter. It has a topic sentence that states a single point, and then the rest of the sentences add evidence or arguments supporting that point. Sometimes the topics of adjacent paragraphs are related, but typically there's a reason the author separated thoughts into their own paragraphs. Authors who work from outlines have usually built a logical foundation and scaffolding for their argument or story. This means we can reverse-engineer their structures to better (and more quickly) understand what they're about.
I learned to do this in graduate school, so I still think of it as "reading like a grad student". But you can use it at any level. It's something I found myself forced to do, when the amount of reading I was assigned each week in several classes exceeded the hours available to read in the style I had been taught. There was too much, and I found that not all of what I read was equally valuable in answering the questions I was pursuing. So instead of reading books cover-to-cover and trying to absorb everything, I trained myself to look for the main ideas and interesting bits of supporting information. I highlighted (if I owned the book) or made notes on cards. Then I wrote summaries of the ideas I had found interesting and commentaries on the parts of the content I had been drawn to.
Typically these ideas I focused on were the ones that had caught my attention naturally as I read. Sometimes I opened a book with a particular question in mind. Often this involved wanting to know what the authors had been interested in communicating to me, so my summaries and comments were about my understanding of and reactions to their main themes, arguments, or narrative. But there was usually also something a bit unique about my response, based on my own interests and the overall direction of my studies. My little essays were generally not complete book reviews, but were focused more or less on my own concerns.
As a teacher I have found this to be true of my students as well. When we read for a class discussion, part of the fun is that different people will focus on elements of the passage that caught their attention as they read. They can typically identify the point of the reading and its main ideas, but there will be different elements each will be drawn to, based on their own life experiences, perspectives, and interests. This is what makes discussion valuable.
Next: Specific elements of the process