How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [189]
We have explained how the questions must be answered for, and the rules applied to, different kinds of books. But we cannot state how they are to be applied to any given work.
The reader himself must be the one to do that.
There are, nevertheless, a few things that can be said with-Appendix B 403
out exceeding the proprieties. We have not concealed the fact that this is a practical book, so applying the first rule of structural analysis is easy enough. We think we have also made it pretty clear what the book is about as a whole, although now you should state this more briefly than we have done in any one place. We hope that our organization into four parts and twenty-one chapters is perspicuous. However, in outlining the book, it might be desirable to comment on the unequal treatment, in terms of numbers of pages, accorded the various levels of reading. The first level of reading-elementary reading
-receives relatively short shrift in this book, although it is of undoubted importance. Why? The third level of reading-analytical reading-receives much more extensive and intensive coverage than any of the other levels. Again, why?
With regard to the fourth rule of structural analysis, we want to emphasize that the problem we set out to solve cannot be defined simply as teaching you to read. There is nothing in this book, for example, that would be of much help to a first- or second-grade teacher. We have concentrated instead on reading in a certain way, and with certain goals in mind.
In applying the fourth rule of reading, that way and those goals should be described with precision.
Similarly with the second stage of analytical readinginterpretation. The first three rules at that stage must be applied by the reader without our help: the rules that require you to come to terms, to find the key propositions, and to construct the arguments. There would be no point in our trying to list what we think are the terms of this work-the important words that must be understood commonly by you and by us if the work as a whole is to communicate knowledge, or impart skill. Nor will we repeat the propositions that we have asserted, and that the reader, if he has read analytically, should be able to state in his own words. Nor will we repeat the arguments. To do so would be to write the book over again.
Something can be said, however, about the problems that we did and did not solve. We believe we did solve the main problem that faced us at the beginning-the problem that you 404 HOW TO READ A BOOK
must have identified in your application of the fourth rule of structural analysis. We do not believe that we solved all of the problems of reading that face students and adult readers today. For one thing, many of these problems involve individual differences between human beings. No book on a general subject can ever hope to solve such difficulties.
The criticism of a book as a communication of knowledge involves, as you will recall, the application of seven rules, three of which are general maxims of intellectual etiquette, and four of which are specific criteria for points of criticism.
We have done what we could to recommend the maxims of intellectual etiquette ( they are discussed in Chapter 10). With regard to the first three points of criticism, we can have nothing to say. But a few remarks about the last of the four criteria of criticism-to show wherein the analysis in the book is incomplete-are not inappropriate.
We would say that our analysis or account is incomplete in two respects. The first is in regard to the first level of reading. There is much more to be said about elementary reading, but we do want to emphasize that that was not our primary concern. Nor would we claim for our discussion of the subject any degree of finality. Elementary reading could be discussed, and has been discussed, in quite different ways.
The other respect in which our analysis