How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (13 page)

How does it behave? These are all theoretical questions. 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?

These are all practical questions.

This list of questions is far from being exhaustive, but it does represent the types of most frequently asked questions in the pursuit of theoretical or practical knowledge. It may help you discover the problems a book has tried to solve. The questions have to be adapted when applied to works of imaginative literature, and there too they will be useful.

The First Stage of Analytical Reading

We have now stated and explained the first four rules of reading. They are rules of analytical reading, although if you inspect a book well before reading it, that will help you to apply them.

It is important at this point to recognize that these first four rules are connected and form a group of rules having a single aim. Together, they provide the reader who applies them with a knowledge of a book's structure. When you have applied them to a book, or indeed to anything fairly lengthy and difficult that you may be reading, you will have accomplished the first stage of reading it analytically.

You should not take the term "stage" in a chronological sense, unless perhaps at the very beginning of your exercise as an analytical reader. 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. Nevertheless, you must realize that knowing a book's structure does constitute a stage toward reading it analytically.

Another way to say this is that applying these first four rules helps you to answer the first basic question about a book. You will recall that that first question is: What is the book about as a whole? You will also recall that we said that this means discovering 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. Clearly, applying the first four rules of reading will provide most of what you need to know in order to answer this question-although it should be pointed out that your answer will improve in accuracy as you proceed to apply the other rules and to answer the other questions.

Since we have now described the first stage of analytical reading, let us pause a moment to write out the first four rules in order, under the appropriate heading, for review.

The First Stage of Analytical Reading, or 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 is trying to solve.

8.COMING TO TERMS WITH AN AUTHOR

The first stage of analytical reading has been accomplished when you have applied the four rules listed at the end of the last chapter, which together allow you to tell what a book is about and to outline its structure. You are now ready to go on to the next stage, which also comprises four rules of reading.

The first of these we call, for short, coming to terms.

Coming to terms is usually the last step in any successful business negotiation. All that remains is to sign on the dotted line. But in the analytical reading of a book, coming to terms is the first step beyond the outline. Unless the reader comes to terms with the author, the communication of knowledge from one to the other does not take place. For a term is the basic element of communicable knowledge.

Words vs. Terms

A term is not a word-at least, not just a word without further qualifications. If a term and a word were exactly the same, you would only have to find the important words in a book in order to come to terms with it. But a word can have many meanings, especially an important word. If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, words have passed between them, but they have not come to terms. Where there is unresolved ambiguity in communication, there is no communication, or at best communication must be incomplete.

Just look at the word "communication" for a moment. Its root is related to the word "common." We speak of a community as a group of people who have something in common.

Communication is an effort on the part of one person to share something with another person (or with an animal or a machine): his knowledge, his decisions, his sentiments. It succeeds only when it results in a common something, such as an item of information or knowledge that two parties share.

When there is ambiguity in the communication of knowledge, all that is in common are the words that one person speaks or writes and another hears or reads. So long as ambiguity persists, there is no meaning in common between writer and reader. For the communication to be successfully completed, therefore, it is necessary for the two parties to use the same words with the same meanings-in short, to come to terms. When that happens, communication happens, the miracle of two minds with but a single thought.

A term can be defined as an unambiguous word. That is not quite accurate, for strictly there are no unambiguous words.

What we should have said is that a term is a word used unambiguously. The dictionary is full of words. They are almost all ambiguous in the sense that they have many meanings. But a word that has several meanings can be used in one sense at a time. When writer and reader somehow manage for a time to use a given word with one and only one meaning, then, during that time of unambiguous usage, they have come to terms.

You cannot find terms in dictionaries, though the materials for making them are there. Terms occur only in the process of communication. They occur when a writer tries to avoid ambiguity and a reader helps him by trying to follow his use of words. There are, of course, many degrees of success in this.

Coming to terms is the ideal toward which writer and reader should strive. Since this is one of the primary achievements of the art of writing and reading, we can think of terms as a skilled use of words for the sake of communicating knowledge.

At this point it is probably clear that we are speaking exclusively of expository writers and expository books. Poetry and fiction are not nearly so concerned with the unambiguous use of words as expository works-works that convey knowledge in the broad sense of the word that we have been employing. It can even be argued that the best poetry is that which is the most richly ambiguous, and it has been said with justice that any good poet is sometimes intentionally ambiguous in his writing. This is an important insight about poetry to which we will return later. It is obviously one of the primary differences between the poetical and the expository or scientific realms of literary art.

We are now ready to state the fifth rule of reading (an expository work). Stated roughly, it is this: You must spot the important words in a book and figure out how the author is using them. But we can make that a little more precise and elegant:

RULE 5. FIND THE IMPORTANT WORDS AND THROUGH THEM COME TO TERMS WITH THE AUTHOR. Note that the rule has two parts. The first part is to locate the important words, the words that make a difference. The second part is to determine the meaning of these words, as used, with precision.

This is the first rule for the second stage of analytical reading, the aim of which is not the outlining of a book's structure but the interpretation of its contents or message. The other rules for this stage, to be discussed in the next chapter, are like this one in an important respect. They also require you to take two steps: a step dealing with the language as such, and a step beyond the language to the thought that lies behind it.

If language were a pure and perfect medium for thought, these steps would not be separate. If every word had only one meaning, if words could not be used ambiguously, if, in short, each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous medium. The reader would see straight through the writer's words to the content of his mind. If that were the case, there would be no need at all for this second stage of analytical reading. Interpretation would be unnecessary.

But of course that is far from the case. There is no use crying about it, no use making up impossible schemes for an ideal language, as the philosopher Leibniz and some of his followers have tried to do. Indeed, if they succeeded, there would be no more poetry. The only thing to do, therefore, in -expository works, is to make the best of language as it is, and the only way to do that is to use language as skillfully as possible when you want to convey, or to receive, knowledge.

Because language is imperfect as a medium for conveying knowledge, it also functions as an obstacle to communication.

The rules of interpretive reading are directed to overcoming that obstacle. We can expect a good writer to do his best to reach us through the barrier language inevitably sets up, but we cannot expect him to do the job all by himself. We must meet him halfway. We, as readers, must try to tunnel through from our side of the barrier. The likelihood of a meeting of minds through language depends on the willingness of both reader and writer to work together. Just as teaching will not avail unless there is a reciprocal activity of being taught, so no author, regardless of his skill in writing, can achieve communication without a reciprocal skill on the part of readers. If that were not so, the diverse skills of writing and reading would not bring minds together, however much effort was expended, any more than the men who tunnel through from opposite sides of a mountain would ever meet unless they made their calculations according to the same principles of engineering.

As we have pointed out, each of the rules of interpretive reading involves two steps. To get technical for a moment, we may say that these rules have a grammatical and a logical aspect. The grammatical aspect is the one that deals with words. The logical step deals with their meanings or, more precisely, with terms. So far as communication is concerned, both steps are indispensable. If language is used without thought, nothing is being communicated. And thought or knowledge cannot be communicated without language. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.

This business of language and thought-especially the distinction between words and terms-is so important that we are going to risk being repetitious to be sure the main point is understood. The main point is that one word can be the vehicle for many terms, and one term can be expressed by many words. Let us illustrate this schematically in the following manner. The word "reading" has been used in many senses in the course of our discussion. Let us take three of these senses: By the word "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. What is symbolized in this scheme by Xa, Xb, and Xc, are not three words, for X remains the same throughout. But they are three terms, on the condition, of course, that you, as reader, and we, as writers know when X is being used in one sense and not another. If we write Xa in a given place, and you read Xb, we are writing and you are reading the same word, but not in the same way. The ambiguity prevents or at least impedes communication. Only when you think the word as we think it, do we have one thought between us. Our minds cannot meet in X, but only in Xa or Xb or Xc. Thus we come to terms.

Finding the Key Words

We are now prepared to put flesh on the rule that requires the reader to come to terms. How does he go about doing it?

How does he find the important or key words in a book?

You can be sure of one thing. Not all the words an author uses are important. Better than that, you can be sure that most of his words are not. Only those words that he uses in a special way are important for him, and for us as readers. This is not an absolute matter, of course, but one of degree. Words may be more or less important. Our only concern is with the fact that some words in a book are more important than others. At one extreme are the words that the author uses as the proverbial man in the street does. Since the author is using these words as everyone does in ordinary discourse, the reader should have no trouble with them. He is familiar with their ambiguity and he has grown accustomed to the variation in their meanings as they occur in this context or that.

For example, the word "reading" occurs in A. S. Eddington's book, The Nature of the Physical World. He speaks of "pointer-readings," the readings of dials and gauges on scientific instruments. He is using the word "reading" in one of its ordinary senses. It is not for him a technical word. He can rely on ordinary usage to convey what he means to the reader.

Even if he used the word "reading" in a different sense somewhere else in the book-in a phrase, let us say, such as "reading nature"-he could be confident that the reader would note the shift to another of the word's ordinary meanings. The reader who could not do this could not talk to his friends or carry on his daily business.

But Eddington is not able to use the word "cause" so lightheartedly. That may be a word of common speech, but he is using it in a definitely special sense when he discusses the theory of causation. How that word is to be understood makes a difference that both he and the reader must bother about. For the same reason, the word "reading" is important in this book. We cannot get along with merely using it in an ordinary way.

An author uses most words as men ordinarily do in conversation, with a range of meanings, and trusting to the context to indicate the shifts. Knowing this fact is some help in detecting the more important words. We must not forget, however, that at different times and places the same words are not equally familiar items in daily usage. Contemporary writers will employ most words as they are ordinarily used today, and you will know which words these are because you are alive today. But in reading books written in the past, it may be more difficult to detect the words the author is using as most people did at the time and place he was writing. The fact that some authors intentionally employ archaic words, or archaic senses of words, complicates the matter further, as does the translation of books from foreign languages.