At best, they are sedulous transcript. They are later become the occasion for what has been well described as "legalized cribbing and schoolboy plagiarism." When they are thrown away after examinations are over, nothing is lost. Intelligent note taking is probably as hard as intelligent reading. In fact, the one must be an aspect of the other, if the notes one makes while reading are record of thought.
Every different opeartion in reading calls for a different step in thinking, and hence the notes one makes at various stages in the process should reflect the variety of intellectual acts one has performed. If one is trying to grasp the structure of a book, one may make several tentative outlines of its main parts in their order, before one is satisfied with one's apprehension of the whole. Schematic outlines and diagrams of all sorts are useful in disengaging the main points from supporting and tangential matters. If one can and will mark the book, it is helpful to underline the important words and sentences as they seem to occur. More than that, one should note the shifts inmeaning by numbering the places at which important words are used successively in different senses. If the author appears to contradict hinmself, some notation should be made of the places at which the inconsistent statements occur, and the contest should be marked for possible indications that the contradiction is only apparent.
There is no point in enumerating further the variety of notations or markings that can be made. There will obviously be as many as there are things to do in the course of reading. The point here is simply that you can discover whether you are doing what should be doing by the note taking or markings which have accompanied your reading.
One illustration of note taking may be helpful here. If I were reading the first few chapters of this book, I might have constructed the following diagram to keep the meaning os "reading" and "learning" clear, and to see them in relatio to one another and to other things:
Types of Reading:
I. For amusement
II. For knowledge
A. For information
B. For understanging
Types of Learning:
I. By discovery: without teachers
II. By instruction: through aid of teachers
A. By live teachers: lectures; liestening
B. By dead teachers: books; reading
Hence Reading II (A and B) is Learning II (B) But books are also of different sorts:
Types of Books:
I. Digests and repetitions of other books
II. Original communications
And it appears that:
Reading II(A) is related more closely to Books I Reading II(B) is related more closely to Books II A scheme of this sort would give me a first grasp of some of the other important distinctions the author was making. I would keep a diagram of this sort before me as I read, to discover how much more filling-in it could take as the author proceed to mulitiply distinctions and to draw conclusions from premises he constructed in terms of these distinctions. Thus, for instance, the distinction between primary and secondary teachers might be added by corelating them with the two types of books.
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We are not prepared to proceed to the next part of this book in which the rules of reading will be discussed. If you carefully examined the Table of Contents before you started, you know that what lies ahead of you. If you are like many readers I know, you paid no attention to the Table of Contents or at best gave it a cursory glance. But Tables of Contents are like maps. They are just as useful in the first reading of a book as a road map is for touring in strange territory.
Suppose you look at the Table of Contents again. What do you find? That the first part of this book, which you have now finished, is a general discussion of reading; that the second part is entirely devoted to the rules; that the thirs part considers the relation of reading to other aspects of one's life. (You will find all this in the Preface also.) You might even guess that in the next part each of the chapters, except the first, would be devoted to the statement and explanation of one or more rules, with examples of their practice. But you could not tell from the titles of these chapters how the rules were grouped into subsets and what was the relation of the various subordinate sets to each other. That, as a matter of fact, will be the business of the first chapter in the next part to make clear. But I can cay this much about it here. The different sets of rules relate to different ways in wich a book can be approached: in terms of its being a complicated structure of parts, having some of unity of organization; in terms of its linguistic elements; in terms of the relation author and reader as if they were engaged in conversation.
Finally, you might be interested to know that there other books about reading, and what their relation is to this one. Mr I.A. Richards has written a long book, to which I have already referred, called Interpretation in Teaching. It is primarily concerned with rules of the second sort described above, and attempts to go much further than this book into the principles of grammar and logic. Professor Tenney of Cornell, who has also been mentioned, recently wrote a book callled Intelligent Reading which also deals primarily with rules of the second sort, though some attention is paid also to the third. His book suggests various exercises in the performance of relatively simple grammatical tasks.
Neither of these books considers rules of the first sort, which means that neither of them faces the problem of how to read a whole book. They are rather concerned with the interpretation of small excerpts and isolated passages.
Someone might suggest that recent books on semantics would also prove helpful. I have some doubts here, for reasons I have already indicated. I would almost say that most of them are useful only in showing how not to read a book. They approach the problem as if most books are not worth reading, especially the great books of the past, or even those in the present by authors who have not undergone semantic purification. That seems to me the wrong approach. The right maxim is like the one which regulates the trial of cirminals. We should assume that the author is intelligible until shown otherwise, not that he is guilty of nonsense and must prove his innocence. And the only way you can determine an author's guilt is to make the very best effort you can to understand him.
Not until you have made such an effort with every available turn of skill have you a right to sin in final judgment on him. If you were an author yourself, you would realize why this is the golden rule of communication among them.
PART II .
THE RULES
CHAPTER SEVEN
From Many Rules to One Habit
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While you are in the stage of learning to read, you have to go over a book more than once. If it is worth reading at all, it is worth three reading at least.
Lest you become unduly alarmed at the demands that are going to be made of you, let me hasten to say that the expert reader can do these three reading at the same time.
What I have called "three readings" need not be three in time. They are, strictly speaking, three in manner. They are three ways of reading a book. To be well read, each book should be read in these three ways each time it is read. The number of distinct times you can read something profitably depends partly on the book and prtly on you as a reader, your resourcefulness and industry.
Only at the beginning, I repeat, the three ways of reading a book must be done separately. Before you become expert, you cannot coalesce a lot of different acts into one complex, harmonious performance. You cannot telescope the different parts of the job so that they run into one another and fuse intimately. Each deserves your full atttention while you are doing it. After you have practice the parts seprately, you not only can do each with greater facility and less attention but you can also gradually put them toether into a smoothly running whole.
I am saying nothing here which is not common knowledge about learning a complex skill. I merely want to be sure you realize that learning to read is at least as complex as learning to typewrite or leaning to play tennis. If you can recall your patience in any other learning experience you
have had, perhaps you will be more tolerant of a tutor who is shortly going to enumerate a long list of rules for reading.
The experimental psychologists have put the learning process under glass for any to look at. The learning curves they have plotted, during countless laboratory studies of every sort of manual skill, show graphically the rate of progress from one state of practice to another. I want to call your attention to two of their findings.
The first is called the "learning plateau." During a series of days in which a performance, such as typewriting or receiving the Morse code telegraphically, is practiced, the curve shows improvement both in speed and in the reduction of errors.
Then suddenly the curve flattens out. For some days, the learner cannot make any advances. His hard work seems to yield no substantial effects either in speed or accuracy. The rule that every bit of practice makes a little more perfect appears to break down. Then, just as suddenly, the learners gets off the plateau and starts to climb again.
The curve which records his achievements again shows steady progress from day to day. And this continues, though perhaps with a slightly diminishing accelaration, until the learner his another plateau.
Plateau are not found in all learning curves, but only in those which record progress in gaining a complex skill. In fact, the more complex the performance to be learned, the more frequency such stationary periods appear. The psychologists have discovered, however, that learning is going on during these periods, though it is hidden in the sense of having no manifest practice effects at the time. The discovery that "higher units" of skills are then being formed is the second of the two findings I referred to before. While the learner is improving in typing single letters, he makes progress in speed and accuracy. But he has to form the habit of typing syllables and words as units, and then later phrases and sentences.
The stage during which the learner is passing from a lower to a higher unit of skill appears to be one of no advance in efficiency, because the learner must develop a certain number of "word units" before he can perform at that level. When he has enough of these units mastered, he makes a new spurt of progress until he has to pass to a higher unit of operation. What at first consisted of a larger number of single acts—the typing of each individual letter—becomes finally one complex act—the typing of a whole sentence. The habit is perfectly fromed only when the learner has reached the highest unit of operation. Where before there seemed to be many habits, which it was difficult to make work together, now there is one habit by virtue of the organization of all the separate acts into one smoothly flowing performance.
The laboratory findings merely confirm what I think most of us know already from our own experience, though we might not have recognized the plateau as a period in which hidden learning is going on. If you are learning to play tennis, you have to learn how to serve the ball, how to receive your opponent's service or return, how to play net, or at the mid-court and base line. Each of these is part of the total skill. At first, each must be mastered separately, because there is a technique for doing each. But none of these by itself is the game of tennis. You have to pass from these lower units to the higher unit in which all the separate skills are put together and become one complex skill. You have to be able to move from one act to another so rapidly and automatically that our attention is free for the strategy of play.
Similarly in the case of learning to drive a car. At first, you learn to steer, shift gears, apply the brake. Gradually these units of activity are mastered and lose their separateness in the proces of driving. You have learned to drive when you have learned to do all these together without thinking about them.
The man who has done one experience in acquiring a complex skill knows that he need not fear the array of rules which present themselves at the beginning of something to be learned. He knows that the does not have to worry about all the different acts, in whch he must become seprately proficient, are going to work together. Knowing that the plateau is learning are periods of hidden progress may prevent discouragement. Higher units of activity are getting formed even if they do not increase one's efficiency all at once.
The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not the plurality of distinct habits. The part acts 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 beating your opponent in tennis, or driving your car to the country. This is an important point. 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 which the technique he has acquired enables him to reach.
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What is true of tennis or driving holds for reading, not simply the grammar-school rudiments, but the highest type of reading for understanding. Anyone who recognizes that such reading is a complex activity will acknowledge this. I have made all this explicit so that you will not think that the demands to be made here are any more exorbitant or exasperating than in other fields of learning.
Not only will you become proficient in following each of the rules, you will gradually cease to concern yourself with the rules as distinct and the separate acts they regulate.
You will be doing a larger job, confident that the parts will take care of themselves. You will no longer pay so much attention to yourself as a reader, and be able to put your mind wholy on the book you are reading.
But for the present we must pay attention to the separate rules. These rules fall into three main groups, each dealing with one of the three indispensable ways a book must be read. I shall now try to explain why there must be three readings.
In the first place, you must be able to grasp what is being offered as knowledge. In the second place, you must judge whether what is being offered is really acceptable to you as knowledge. In the other words, there is first the task of understanding the book, and second the job of criticizing it. These two are quite separate, as you will see more and more.
The process of understanding can be further divided. To understand a book, you must approach it, first, as a whole, having a unity and a structure of parts; and, second, in terms of its elements, its units of language and thought.
Thus, there are three distinct readings, which can be rariously named and described as follows:
I. The first reading can be called structural or analytic. Here the reader proceeds from the whole to its parts.
II. The second reading can be called interpretative or synthetic. Here the reader proceeds from the parts to the whole.
III. The third reading can be called critical or evaluative. Here the reader judges the author, and decides whether he agrees or disagrees.
In each of these three main divisions, there are several steps to be taken, and hence several rules. You have already being introduced to three of the four rules for doing the second reading: (1) you must discover and interpret the most important words in the book; (2) you must do the same for the most important sentences, and (3) similarly for the paragraph which express arguments. The fourth rule, which I have not yet mentioned, is that you must know which of his problems the author solved, and which he failed on.
To accomplish the first reading you must know (1) what kind of book it is; that is, the subject matter it is about. You must also know (2) what the book as a whole is trying to say; (3) into what parts that whole is divided, and (4) what the main problems are that the author is trying to solve. Here, too, there are four steps and four rules.
Notice that the parts which you come to by analyzing the whole in this first reading are not exactly the same as the parts you start with to construct the whole in the second reading. In the former case, the parts are the ultimate divisions of the author's treatment of his subject matter or problem. In the latter case, the parts are such things as terms, propositions,
and syllogisms; that is, the author's ideas, assertions, and arguments.
The third reading also involves a nmumber of steps. There are first several general rules about how you must undertake the task of critism, and then there are a number of critical points you can make-- four in all. The rules for the third reading tell you what points can be made and how to make them.
In this chapter, I am going to discuss all the rules in a general way. Later chapters take them up separately. If you wish to see a single, compact tabulation of all these rules you will find it on pages 266-7, at the opening of Chapter Fourteen.
Though you will unerstand it better later, it is possible to show you here how these various reading will coalesce, especially the first two. That has already been somewhat indicated by the fact that both have to do with whole and parts in some sense. Knowing what the whole book is about and what its main divisions are will help you discover its leading terms and propositions. If you can discover what the chief contentions of the author are and how the supports these by argument and evidence, you will be aided in the determining the general tenor of his treatment and its major divisions.
The lst step in the first reading is to define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve. The last step in the second reading is to decide whether the author has solved these problems, or which he has and which he has not. Thus you see how closely the first two readings are related, converging as it were in their final steps.
As you become more expert, you will be able to do these two readings together. The better you can do them together, the more they will help each other get done. But the third reading will never become, infact never can become, absolutely simultaneous with the other two. Even the most expert reader must do the first two and the third somewhat separately. Understanding an author must always precede criticizing or judging him.
I have met many "readers" who do the third raeding first. Worse than that, they fail to do the first two readings at all. They pick up a book and soon begin to tell you what is wrong with it. They are full of opinions which the book is merely a pretext for expressing. They can hardly be called "readers" at all. They are more like people you know who think a conversation is an occasion for talking but not listening. Not only are such people are not woth your effort in talking, but they are usually not worth listening either.
HOW TO READ A BOOK Page 11
