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author's ideas about his subject matter. Often, however, you will not; and certainly you should put off making any judgment of the accuracy or truth of the statements until you have read the book more carefully. Then, during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book. The notes you make at this level of reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual. They concern the author's concepts, and also your own, as they have been deepened or broadened by your reading of the book.

There is an obvious difference between structural and conceptual note-making. What kind of notes do you make when you are giving several books a syntopical reading-when you are reading more than one book on a single subject? Again, such notes will tend to be conceptual; and the notes on a page may refer you not only to other pages in that book, but also to pages in other books.

There is a step beyond even that, however, and a truly expert reader can take it when he is reading several books syntopically. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

Since they are made concerning several books, not just one, they often have to be made on a separate sheet ( or sheets ) of paper. Here, a structure of concepts is implied-an order of statements and questions about a single subject matter. We will return to this kind of note-making in Chapter 20.

Form ing the Habi t of Reading

Any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed the habit of operating according to its rules. This is the way the artist or crafsman in any field differs from those who lack his skill.

Now there is no other way of forming a habit of operation How to Be a Demanding Reader 53

than by operating. That is what it means to say one learns to do by doing. The difference between your activity before and after you have formed a habit is a difference in facility and readiness. After practice, you can do the same thing much better than when you started. That is what it means to say practice makes perfect. What you do very imperfectly at first, you gradually come to do with the kind of almost automatic perfection that an instinctive performance has. You do something as if you were born to it, as if the activity were as natural to you as walking or eating. That is what it means to say that habit is second nature.

Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having the habit. When we speak of a man as skilled in any way, we do not mean that he knows the rules of making or doing something, but that he possesses the habit of making or doing it.

Of course, it is true that knowing the rules, more or less explicitly, is a condition of getting the skill. You cannot follow rules you do not know. Nor can you acquire an artistic habitany craft or skill-without following rules. The art as something that can be taught consists of rules to be followed in operation. The art as something learned and possessed consists of the habit that results from operating according to the rules.

Incidentally, not everyone understands that being an artist consists in operating according to rules. People point to a highly original painter or sculptor and say, "He isn't following rules. He's doing something entirely original, something that has never been done before, something for which there are no rules." But they fail to see what rules it is that the artist follows. There are no final, unbreakable rules, strictly speaking, for making a painting or sculpture. But there are rules for preparing canvas and mixing paints and applying them, and for moulding clay or welding steel. Those rules the painter or sculptor must have followed, or else he could not have made the thing he has made. No matter how original his final production, no matter how little it seems to obey the "rules" of 54 HOW TO READ A BOOK

art as they have traditionally