How to Read, Part 2
Specific elements of the process
This part is so repetitive of things that have been said before that I'm almost embarrassed to include it. But although these techniques are super-obvious, they are the things most people don't do most of the time. Even people who know better! So I'll include this section as a reminder to us all (including myself).
People have been saying for ages that active reading involves engaging in some sort of "conversation" with books and their authors. How do we do this? If the authors aren't standing in front of us, talking about their ideas, we can't just raise our hands and comment or ask a question. The natural response and the mirror image of reading is writing. There's a long and very interesting history of readers annotating texts, making notes in the margins of pages. This began even before the invention of the printing press and in the era of print, people like Benjamin Franklin carried on the technique. Franklin advised his readers "to read with a pen in your hand and enter into a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful", suggesting that this would be the best way to imprint these ideas in our memories. There are several important ideas in this advice; I'll take them one by one.
Nowadays we are all familiar with highlighting. Whether we use bright-colored transparent-ink markers in physical books or drag-to-highlight features of reading software, highlighting has become universal. But what do we highlight? And what should we do after we highlight? Some readers highlight too much, and the pages they've read become covered in color. Some highlight only key words, so they can be located later. But then they have to go back and locate them. Which way is better?
Like most things, it depends on the reader's goal. One of my main objections to some of the guides to reading or note-taking that I have read in the past has been the idea that one size fits all. Or at least, if the authors didn't actually believe this, the lack of focus on using different reading tactics to meet different goals. Some of these goals might include:
- Reading to understand an author's argument, so you can critique it or respond to it;
- Reading to accumulate information and data the author uses, for your own purposes;
- Reading to learn facts and ideas that will provide background for a narrative or argument;
- Reading for enjoyment, which often involves novelty.
There are certainly many more. And most of the time we read, we're probably pursuing more than one goal. But I think you can imagine the differences in what you would focus on, if you were deconstructing an author's thesis versus accumulating names and dates for background. The point is, we have different goals; sometimes even with the same text. I may read a book at one time to understand the author's argument, but then return to it to mine the evidence and examples for interesting details I might pursue in their own right. There are a lot of questions that can be asked and answered, when we engage with books. For many people, the quality that defines a "Great Book" is the richness of its ability to inspire many possible responses.
But Franklin said "with a pen in hand", not a highlighter. I think this is more than just because highlighters didn't exist in the eighteenth century. He could easily have said, underline passages you find interesting or make marks in the margins to call your attention back to important passages. But he didn't; he said "enter into a little book short hints".
Franklin also didn't say, copy verbatim quotes of the most important things you read into a commonplace book. This is another technique that people have been using from time immemorial. It's a valuable process, but I don't think it's quite what Franklin was advising. I think the words "short hints" are the key to using ideas from books (or other things we read, watch, listen to) to enhance our own thinking. I sometimes call this translation; sometimes digestion.
Don't get me wrong. I appreciate a powerful line of poetry or prose as much as the next reader. Sometimes I want to write it out, so I can remember it or have it available to quote. But for me, most of the time, my goal is to use the information I gather to inform, or enhance, or expand my understanding of an issue or of the world at large. Another way of saying this is that what I'm usually trying to do as a reader is to take ideas that others have developed and make them my own.
When I eat a steak, I don't expect to see the beef being directly incorporated into my muscles. It needs to be broken down into its chemical components, and only after that process the proteins will contribute to building my own muscles. I think the same is true of ideas. I can't just take someone else's argument and make it my own. I need to process it and digest it, so it becomes mine. The other analogy I used for this process is translation, because I think the main element of this processing is to put the ideas you want to preserve into your own words.
Some note-making gurus have made extravagant claims about the neuro-generative processes that may be triggered when we write things down -- some of them have even insisted that handwriting with a pen beats typing. I suppose I probably remember things a little better if I write myself a note, but I don't really care much about this distinction. I'm not that interested in where my "first brain" ends and my "second brain" begins, as long as I can learn new ideas and information effectively and then access them when I need them. I do accept the idea that we typically think better by either speaking or writing. I might even go as far as agreeing that for many of us, much of the time, as Niklas Luhmann claimed, "thinking is writing".
My process does begin typically with some type of highlighting. If I own the book this probably takes the form of using a yellow highlighter or the yellow highlight option of a Kindle or pdf-reader. If I don't own the book, I usually use little post-it notes to mark the spot I need to go back to when I'm finished reading. In both cases, it's what I do when I have finished (either the entire book or the reading session, it varies) that matters. The next step is translation.
I rarely quote. A passage has to be extremely important or a point extremely well-put for me to take the trouble to write it out word for word. Nowadays, I only do this if I'm planning on actually quoting the passage directly in something I'm going to write. This does happen fairly regularly (see my book reviews for examples), but more often I want to paraphrase the author's argument or information as accurately and faithfully as I can, in my own words. It's another well-understood principle that we demonstrate learning not by quoting but by paraphrasing.
Whether I have highlighted a text I own or marked pages with little post-it tabs, when I am finished reading I really don't consider the process done until I have reviewed these highlights and recorded what I thought was interesting or important about them. Usually this takes the form of something like, "[Author name] said this about that," along with the source and page number. When I review these notes again, after I've made them, I'll add keywords that allow me to generalize the idea even further and connect it with other ideas in my notes. But at this stage the point is to get the idea transferred out of the book and into my own notes.
(Aside: there has also been a lot of talk lately about whether it's better to take notes by hand or to use an app. I've tried both ways and I continue to use both systems. I think the ideas I'm talking about in this section are equally valid and equally important, whatever system you're translating and digesting into.)
Some examples of this:
A note I typed into Obsidian, complete with a brief quotation, a title and some keywords:
Age and Wisdom
"Young men's minds are light as air, but when an old man comes he looks before and after, deeming that which shall be fairest upon both sides."
The Iliad, GB4, 20a, 3
Menelaus supports bringing King Priam to negotiate on behalf of the Trojans rather than his sons, whom he says are "high-handed and ill to trust". This may be based on sincere respect for age and wisdom or from an expectation of a better outcome negotiating with an aged king rather than his warrior sons. Whatever Menelaus' motives, his justification probably represents widely-held beliefs about the ability of older people to judge more calmly and justly.
[[WISDOM]] and [[JUSTICE]] are both Great Ideas in The Syntopicon and [[Age]] is in the keywords index.
A note I wrote by hand on a 3x5 index card:
In beginning to describe the Great Ideas, Adler emphasizes that they are a selection and acknowledges that it is quite legitimate to question the "criteria controlling the selection". He also admits the possibility of disagreement.
KW: Great Ideas, Selection
"The Principles and Methods of Syntopical Construction", p. 1219
The point of writing out these observations is that they record what I got out of the passage I read, so that I don't have to return to the text unless I develop a new set of interests or questions. For example, next time I want to think about how Mortimer Adler designed the Syntopicon, I can refer to the fourteen notes I took rather than reopening the book and browsing through the eighty pages of the article. This is a huge time-saver, even if I did highlight the passages in the book. The additional advantage, of course, is that I can connect these notes (whether they're on cards or in an app on my computer) with other notes on similar ideas, from other sources. This is also vitally important in the process of making these ideas my own -- and is basically the point of this whole book.
Next time: some even more specific examples of dealing with terminology, argument, and evidence