How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [25]
There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here are some devices that can be used: 1. UNDERUNING-of major points; of important or forceful statements.
2. VERTICAL LINES AT THE MARGIN-tO emphasize a statement already underlined or to point to a passage too long to be underlined.
50 HOW TO READ A BOOK
3. STAR, ASTERISK, OR OTHER DOODAD AT THE MARGIN-tO
be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or dozen most important statements or passages in the book. You may want to fold a comer of each page on which you make such marks or place a slip of paper between the pages. In either case, you will be able to take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it to the indicated page, refresh your recollection.
4. NuMBERS IN THE MARGIN-to indicate a sequence of points made by the author in developing an argument.
5. NUMBERS OF OTHER PAGES IN THE MARGIN-tO indicate where else in the book the author makes the same points, or points relevant to or in contradiction of those here marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together. Many readers use the symbol "Cf" to indicate the other page numbers; it means
"compare" or "refer to."
6. CmCLING OF KEY WORDS OR PHRASES-This serves much the same function as underlining.
7. WRITING IN THE MARGIN, OR AT THE TOP OR BOTTOM OF
THE PAGE-to record questions ( and perhaps answers ) which a passage raises in your mind; to reduce a complicated discussion to a simple statement; to record the sequence of major points right through the book. The endpapers at the back of the book can be used to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.
To inveterate book-markers, the front endpapers are often the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. But that expresses only their financial ownership of the book. The front endpapers are better reserved for a record of your thinking. After finishing the book and making your personal index on the back endpapers, tum to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point How to Be a Demanding Reader 51
( you have already done that at the back ) , but as an integrated structure, with a basic outline and an order of parts. That outline will be the measure of your understanding of the work; unlike a bookplate, it will express your intellectual ownership of the book.
The Three Kinds of Note-making
There are three quite different kinds of notes that you will make in your books as well as about them. Which kind you make depends upon the level at which you are reading.
When you give a book an inspectional reading, you may not have much time to make notes in it; inspectional reading, as we have observed, is always limited as to time. Nevertheless, you are asking important questions about a book when you read it at this level, and it would be desirable, even if it is not always possible, to record your answers when they are fresh in your mind.
The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole?
and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter? You may and probably should make notes concerning your answers to these questions, especially if you know that it may be days or months before you will be able to return to the book to give it an analytical reading. The best place to make such notes is on the contents page, or perhaps on the title page, which are otherwise unused in the scheme we have outlined above.
The point to recognize is that these notes primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance-at least not in detail. We therefore call this kind of note-making structural.
In the course of an inspectional reading, especially of a long and difficult book, you may attain some insights