How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (14 page)

Nevertheless, it remains true that most of the words in any book can be read just as one would use them in talking to one's friends. Take any page of this book and count the words we are using in that way: all the prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, and almost all of the verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. In this chapter so far, there have been only a few important words: "word," "term," ambiguity," "communication," and perhaps one or two more. Of these, "term" is clearly the most important; all the others are important in relation to it.

You cannot locate the key words without making an effort to understand the passage in which they occur. This situation is somewhat paradoxical. If you do understand the passage, you will, of course, know which words in it are the most important. If you do not fully understand the passage, it is probably because you do not know the way the author is using certain words. If you mark the words that trouble you, you may hit the very ones the author is using specially. That this is likely to be so follows from the fact that you should have no trouble with the words the author uses in an ordinary way.

From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble. It is likely that these words are important for the author as well. However, they may not be.

It is also possible that words that are important for the author do not bother you, and precisely because you understand them. In that case, you have already come to terms with the author. Only where you fail to come to terms have you work still to do.

Technical Words and Special Vocabularies

So far we have been proceeding negatively by eliminating the ordinary words. You discover some of the important words by the fact that they are not ordinary for you. That is why they bother you. But is there any other way of spotting the important words? Are there any positive signs that point to them?

There are several. The first and most obvious sign is the explicit stress an author places upon certain words and not others. He may do this in many ways. He may use such typographical devices as quotation marks or italics to mark 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.

No one can read Euclid without knowing that such words as "point," "line," "plane," "angle," "parallel," and so forth are of the first importance. These are the words that name geometrical entities defined by Euclid. There are other important words, such as "equals," "whole," and "part," but these do not name anything that is defined. You know they are important from the fact that they occur in the axioms. Euclid helps you here by making his primary propositions explicit at the very beginning. You can guess that the terms composing such propositions are basic, and that underlines for you the words that express these terms. You may have no· difficulty with these words, because they are words of common speech, and Euclid appears to be using them that way.

If all authors wrote as Euclid did, you may say, this business of reading would be much easier. But that of course is not possible, although there have in fact been men who thought that any subject matter could be expounded in the geometrical manner. The procedure-the method of exposition and proof-that works in mathematics is not applicable in every field of knowledge. In any event, for our purposes it is sufficient to note what is common to every sort of exposition.

Every field of knowledge has its own technical vocabulary.

Euclid makes his plain right at the beginning. The same is true of any writer, such as Galileo or Newton, who writes in the geometrical manner. In books differently written or in other fields, the technical vocabulary must be discovered by the reader.

If the author has not pointed out the words himself, the reader may locate them through having some prior knowledge of the subject matter. If he knows something about biology or economics before he begins to read Darwin or Adam Smith, he certainly has some leads toward discerning the technical words. The rules of analyzing a book's structure may 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.

From this you know, for example, that "wealth" is a technical word for Adam Smith, and "species" for Darwin.

Since one technical word leads to another, you cannot help but discover other technical words in a similar fashion. You can soon make a list of the important words used by Adam Smith : labor, capital, land, wages, profits, rent, commodity, price, exchange, productive, unproductive, money, and so forth. And here are some you cannot miss in Darwin: variety, genus, selection, survival, adaptation, hybrid, fittest, creation.

Where a field of knowledge has a well-established technical vocabulary, the task of locating the important words in a book treating that subject matter is relatively easy. You can spot them positively through having some acquaintance with the field, or negatively by knowing what words must be technical, because they are not ordinary. Unfortunately, there are many fields in which a technical vocabulary is not well established.

Philosophers are notorious for having private vocabularies.

There are some words, of course, that have a traditional standing in philosophy. Though they may not be used by all writers in the same sense, they are nevertheless technical words in the discussion of certain problems. But philosophers often find it necessary to coin new words, or to take some word from common speech and make it a technical word. This last procedure is likely to be most misleading to the reader who supposes that he knows what the word means, and therefore treats it as an ordinary word. Most good authors, however, anticipating just this confusion, give very explicit warning whenever they adopt the procedure.

In this connection, one clue to an important word is that the author quarrels with other writers about it. When you find an author telling you how a particular word has been used by others, and why he chooses to use it otherwise, you can be sure that word makes a great difference to him.

We have here emphasized the notion of technical vocabulary, but you must not take this too narrowly. The relatively small set of words that express an author's main ideas, his leading concepts, constitutes his special vocabulary. They are the words that carry his analysis, his argument. If he is making an original communication, some of these words are likely to be used by him in a very special way, although he may use others in a fashion that has become traditional in the field. In either' case, these are the words that are most important for him. They should be important for you as a reader also, but in addition any other word whose meaning is not clear is important for you.

The trouble with most readers is that they simply do not pay enough attention to words to locate their difficulties. They fail to distinguish the words that they do not understand sufficiently from those they do. All the things we have suggested to help you find the important words in a book will be of no avail unless you make a deliberate effort to note the words you must work on to find the terms they convey. The reader who fails to ponder, or at least to mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.

If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that not all of its words will be completely intelligible to you. If you proceed as if they were all ordinary words, all on the same level of general intelligibility as the words of a newspaper article, you will make no headway toward interpretation of the book. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand it.

Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The outstanding fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author.

Finding the Meanings

Spotting the important words is only the beginning of the task. It merely locates the places in the text where you have to go to work. There is another part of this fifth rule of reading.

Let us turn to that now. Let us suppose you have marked the words that trouble you. What next?

There are two main possibilities. Either the author is using these words in a single sense throughout or he is using them in two or more senses, shifting his meaning from place to place. In the first alternative, the word stands for a single term. A good example of the use of important words so that they are restricted to a single meaning is found in Euclid. In the second alternative, the word stands for several terms.

In the light of these alternatives, your procedure should be as follows. 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.

But, you may complain, everything is clear except the main thing. How does one find out what the meanings are?

The answer, though simple, may appear unsatisfactory. But patience and practice will show you otherwise. The answer is that 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. This must be the way, no matter how merry-go-roundish it may seem at first.

The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider a definition.

A definition is stated in words. If you do not understand any of the words used in the definition, you obviously cannot understand the meaning of the word that names the thing defined. The word "point" is a basic word in geometry. You may think you know what it means (in geometry), but Euclid wants to be sure you use it in only one way. He tells you what he means by first defining the thing he is later going to use the word to name. He says : "A point is that which has no part."

How does that help to bring you to terms with him? You know, he assumes, what every other word in the sentence means with sufficient precision. You know that whatever has parts is a complex whole. You know that the opposite of complex is simple. To be simple is the same as to lack parts.

You know that the use of the words "is" and "that which"

means that the thing referred to must be an entity of some sort. Incidentally, it follows from all this that, if there are no physical things without parts, a point, as Euclid speaks of it, cannot be physical.

This illustration is typical of the process by which you acquire meanings. You operate with meanings you already possess. If every word that was used in a definition had itself to be defined, nothing could ever be defined. If every word in a book you were reading was entirely strange to you, as in the case of a book in a totally foreign language, you could make no progress at all.

That is what people mean when they say of a book that it is all Greek to them. They simply have not tried to understand it, which would be justifiable if it were really in Greek. But most of the words in any English book are familiar words.

These words surround the strange words, the technical words, the words that may cause the reader some trouble. The surrounding words are the context for the words to be interpreted.

The reader has all the materials he needs to do the job.

We are not pretending the job is an easy one. We are only insisting that it is not an impossible one. If it were, no one could read a book to gain in understanding. The fact that a book can give you new insights or enlighten you indicates that it probably contains words you may not readily understand. If you could not come to understand those words by· your own efforts, then the kind of reading we are talking about would be impossible. It would be impossible to pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own operations on a book.

There is no rule of thumb for doing this. The process is something like the trial-and-error method of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The more parts you put together, the easier it is to find places for the remaining parts, if only because there are fewer of them. A book comes to you with a large number of words already in place. A word in place is a term. It is definitely located by the meaning that you and the author share in using it. The remaining words must be put in place.

You do this by trying to make them fit this way or that. The better you understand the picture that the words so far in place already partially reveal, the easier it is to complete the picture by making terms of the remaining words. Each word put into place makes the next adjustment easier.

You will make errors, of course, in the process. You will think you have managed to find where a word belongs and how it fits, only to discover later that the placement of another word requires you to make a whole series of readjustments.

The errors will get corrected because, so long as they are not found out, the picture cannot be completed. Once you have had any experience at all in this work of coming to terms, you will soon be able to check yourself. You will know whether you have succeeded or not. You will not blithely think you understand when you do not.

In comparing a book to a jigsaw puzzle, we have made one assumption that is not true. A good puzzle is, of course, one all of whose parts fit. The picture can be perfectly completed. The same is true of the ideally good book, but there is no such book. In proportion as books are good, their terms will be so well made and put together by the author that the reader can do the work of interpretation fruitfully. Here, as in the case of every other rule of reading, bad books are less readable than good ones. The rules do not work on them, except to show you how bad they are. If the author uses words ambiguously you cannot find out what he is trying to say. You can only find out that he has not been precise.