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adverbs play, how verbs function in relation to nouns, how modifying words and clauses restrict or amplify the meaning of the words they modify, and so forth. Ideally, you should be able to dissect a sentence according to the rules of syntax, although you do not necessarily have to do it in a formal way. Despite the current de-emphasis on teaching grammar in school, we have to assume that you know this much of it. We cannot believe you do not, though you may have grown a little rusty from lack of practice in the rudiments of the art of reading.

There are only two differences between finding the terms that words express and the propositions that sentences express.

One is that you employ a larger context in the latter case. You bring all the surrounding sentences to bear on the sentence in question, just as you used the surrounding words to interpret a particular word. In both cases, you proceed from what you do understand to the gradual elucidation of what is at first relatively unintelligible.

The other difference lies in the fact that complicated sentences usually express more than one proposition. You have not completed your interpretation of an important sentence until you have separated out of it all the different, though perhaps related, propositions. Skill in doing this comes with practice.

Take some of the complicated sentences in this book and try to state in your own words each of the things that is being asserted. Number them and relate them.

"State in your own words!" That suggests the best test we know for telling whether you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence. If, when you arc asked to explain what the author means by a particular sentence, all you can do is repeat his very words, with some minor alterations 1 26 HOW TO READ A BOOK

in their order, you had better suspect that you do not know what he means. Ideally, you should be able to say the same thing in totally diHerent words. The idea can, of course, be approximated in varying degrees. But if you cannot get away at all from the author's words, it shows that only words have passed from him to you, not thought or knowledge. You know his words, not his mind. He was trying to communicate knowledge, and all you received was words.

The process of translation from a foreign language to English is relevant to the test we have suggested. If you cannot state in an English sentence what a French sentence says, you know you do not understand the meaning of the French.

But even if you can, your translation may remain only on the verbal level; for even when you have formed a faithful English replica, you still may not know what the writer of the French sentence was trying to convey.

The translation of one English sentence into another, however, is not merely verbal. The new sentence you have formed is not a verbal replica of the original. If accurate, it is faithful to the thought alone. That is why making such translations is the best test you can apply to yourself, if you want to be sure you have digested the proposition, not merely swallowed the words. If you fail the test, you have uncovered a failure of understanding. If you say that you know what the author means, but can only repeat the author's sentence to show that you do, then you would not be able to recognize the author's proposition if it were presented to you in other words.

The author may himself express the same proposition in different words in the course of his writing. The reader who has not seen through the words to the proposition they convey is likely to treat the equivalent sentences a'> if they were statements of different propositions. Imagine a person who did not know that "2 + 2 = 4" and "4

2

-

= 2" were diHerent notations for the same arithmetic relationship-the relationship of four as the double of two, or two as the half of four.

You would have to conclude that that person simply did Determining an Author's Message 1 27

not understand the equation. The same conclusion is forced on you concerning yourself or anybody else who cannot tell when equivalent