HOW TO READ A BOOK Read online

  After the first year of teaching, I had few illusions left about my literacy. Since then, I have been teaching students how to read books, six years at Columbia with Mark Van Doren and for the last ten years at the University of Chicago with President Robert M.

  Hutchins. In the course of years, I think I have gradually learned to read a little better.

  There is no longer any danger of self-deception, of supposing that I have become expert.

  Why? Because reading the same books year after year, I discover each time what I found out the first year I began to teach: the book I am rereading is almost new to me.

  For a while, each time I reread it, that I had really read it well at last, only to have the next reading show up my inadequacies and misinterpretations. After this happens several times, even the dullest of us is likely to learn that perfect reading lies at the end of the rainbow. Although practice makes perfect, in this art of reading as in any other, the long run needed to prove the maxim is longer than the allotted span.

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  I am torn between two impulses. I certainly want to encourage you to undertake this business of learning to read, but I do not want to fool you by saying that it is quite easy or that it can be done in a short time. I am sure you do not want to be fooled. As in the case of every other skill, learning to read well presents difficulties to be overcome by effort and time. Anyone who undertakes anything is prepared for that, I think, and knows that the achievement seldom exceeds the effort. After all, it takes time and trouble to grow up from the cradle, to make a fortune, raise a family, or gain the wisdom that some old men have. Why should it not take time and trouble to learn to read and to read what is worth reading?

  Of course, it would not take so long if we got started when we were in school.

  Unfortunately, almost the opposite happens: one gets stopped. I shall discuss the failure of the schools more fully later. Here I wish only to record this fact about our schools, a fact which concerns us all, because in large part they have made us what we are today—

  people who cannot read well enough to enjoy reading for profit or profit by reading for emjoyment.

  But education does not stop with schooling, nor does the responsibility for the ultimate educatiional fate of each of us rest entirely on the school system. Everyone can and must decide for himself whether he is satisfied with the education he got, or is now getting if he is still in school. If he is not satisfied, it is up to him to do something about it. With schools as they are, more schooling is hardly the remedy. One weay out—

  perhaps the onlyone available to most people—is to learn to read better, and then, by reading better, to learn more of what can be learned through reading.

  The way out and how to take it is what this book tries to show. It is for adults who have gradually become aware of how little they got from all their schooling, as well as for those who, lacking such opportunities, have been puzzled to know how to overcome a derprivation they need not to regret too much. It is for student in shool and college who may occasionally wonder how to help themselves to education. It is even for teachers who may sometimes realize that they are not giving all the help they should, and that maybe they do not know how.

  When I think of this large potential audience as the average reader, I am not neglecting all the differences in training and ability, in schooling or experience, and certainly not the different degrees of interest or sorts of motivation which can be brought to this common task. But what is of primary importance is that all of us share a recognition of the task and its worth.

  We may be engaged in occupations which do not require us to read for a living, but we may still feel that that living would be graded, in its moments of leisure, by some learning—the sort we can do by ourselves through reading. We may be professionally occupied with matters that demand a kind of technical reading in the course of our work: the physician has to keep up with the medical literature; the lawyer never stops reading cases; the businessman has to read financial statements, insurance policies, contracts, and so forth. No matter whether the reading is to learn or to earn, it can be done poorly or well.

  We may be college students—perhaps candidates for a higher degree—and yet realize that what is happening to us is stuffing, not education. There are many college students who know, certainly by the time they get their bachelor's degree, that they spent four years taking courses and finishing with them by passing examinations. The mastery attained in that process is not of subject matter, but of the teacher's personality. If the student remembers enough of what was told to him in lectures and textbooks, and if he has a line on the teacher's pet prejudices, he can pass the course easily enough. but he is also passing up an education.

  We may be teachers in some school, college, or university. I hope that most of us teachers know we are not expert readers. I hope we know, not merely that our students can not read well, but also that we cannot do much better. Every profession has a certain amount of humbug about it necessary for impressing the laymen or the clients to be served. The humbug we teachers have to practice is the front we put on of knowledge and expertness. It is not entirely humbug, because we usually know a little more and can do a little better than our best students. But we must not let the humbug fool ourselves.

  If we do not know that our students cannot read very well, we are worse than humbugs: we do not our business at all. And if we do not know that we cannot read very much better than they, we have allowed our professional imposture to deceive ourselves.

  Just as the best doctors are those who can somehow retain the patient's confidence not by hiding but by confessing their limitations, so the best teachers are those who make the fewest pretensions. If the students are on all fours with a difficult problem, the teacher who shows that he is only crawling also, helps them much more than the pedagogue who appears to fly in maginficient circles far above their heads.Perhaps, if we teachers were more honest about our own reading disabilities, less loath to reveal how hard it is for us to read and how often we fumble, we might get the students interest in the game of learning instead of the game of passing.

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  I trust I have said enough to indicate to readers who cannot read that I am one who cannot read much better than they. My chief advantage is the clarity with which I know that I cannot, and perhaps why I cannot. That is the best fruit of years of experience in trying to teach others. Of course, if I am just a little better than someone else, I can help him somewhat. Although none of us can read well enough to satisfy ourselves, we may be able to read better than someone else. Although few of us read well for the most part, each of us may do a good job of reading in some particular connection, when the stakes are high enough to compel the rare exertion.

  The student who is generally superficial may, for a special reason, read some one thing well. Scholars who are as superficial as the rest of us in most of their reading often do a careful job when the text is in their own narrow field, especially if their reputations hang on what they say. On cases relevant to his practice, a lawyer is likely to read analytically. A physician may similarly read clinical reports which describe symptoms he is currently concerned with. But both these learned men may make similar effort in other fields or at other times. Even business assumes the air of a learned profession when its devotees are called upon to examine financial statements or contracts, though I have heard it said that many businessmen cannot read these documents intelligently even when their fortunes are at stake.

  If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions or occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do.

  When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the color
of words, the odor of phrases, and the weight of sentences.They may even take the punctuation into account. Then, if never before or after, they read.

  These examples, especially the last, are enough to suggest a first approximation of what I mean by "reading." That is not enough, however. What this is all about can be more accurately understood only if the different kinds and grades of reading are more definitely distinguished. To read this book intelligently—which is what this book aims to help its readers do with all books—such distinctions must be grasped. that belongs to the next chapter. Here suffice it if it is understood that this book is not about reading in every sense but only about that kind of reading which its readers do not do well enough, or at all, except when they are in love

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Reading of "Reading"

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  One of the primary rules for reading anything is to spot the most important words the author uses. Spotting them is not enough, however. You have to know how they are being used. Finding an important word merely begins the more difficult research for the meanings, one or more, common or special, which the word is used to convey as it appears here and there in the text.

  You already know "reading" is one of the most important words in this book. But, as I have already sugggested, it is a word of many meanings. If you take for granted that you know what I mean by the word, we are likely to get into difficulties before we proceed much further.

  This business of using language to talk about language—specially if one is campaigning against its abuse—is risky. Recently Mr. Stuart Chase wrote a book which he should have called Words bout Words. He might then have avoided the barb of the critics who so quickly pointed out that Mr. Chase himself was subject to the tyranny of word. Mr.

  Chase recognized the peril when he said , "I shall frequently be caught in my own trap by using bad language in a plea for better."

  Can I avoid such pitfalls? I am writing about reading and so it would appear that I do not have to obey the rules of reading but of writing. My escape may be more apparrent than real, if it turns out that a writer should keep in mind the rules which govern reading. You, however, are reading about reading. You cannot escape. If the reules of reading I am going to suggest are sound, you must follow them in reading this book.

  But, you will say, how can we follow the rules until we learn and understand them? To do that we shall have to read some part of this book without knowing what the rules are.

  The only way I know to help out of this dilemma is by making you reading-conscious readers as we proceed. Let us start at once by applying the rule about find and interpreting the important words.

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  When you start out to investigate the various senses of a word, it is usually wise to begin with a dictionary and your own knowledge of common usage. If you looked up

  "read" in the large Oxford Dictionary, you would find, first, that the same four letters constituted an obsolete noun referring to the fourth stomach of a ruminant, and the commonly used verb which refers to a mental activity involving words or symbols of some sort. You would know at once that we need not bother with the obsolete noun except, perhaps, to note that reading has something to do with rumination. You would discover next that the verb has twenty-one more or less closely related meanings, more or less common.

  One uncommon meaning of "to read" is to think or suppose. This meaning passes into the more usual one of conjecturing or predicting, as when we speak of reading the stars, one's prm, or one's future. That leads eventually to the meaning of the word in which it refers to perusing books or other written documents. There are many other meanings, such as verbal utterance ( when an actress reads her lines for the director); such as detecting what is not perceptible from what is (when we asy we can read a person's character in his face); such as instruction, academic or personal (when we have someone read us a lecture).

  The slight variations in usage seem endless; a singer reads music; a scientist reads nature; an engineer reads his instruments; a printer reads proof; we read between the lines; we read something into situation, or someone out of the party.

  We can simplify matters by noting what is common to many of these senses; namely, that mental activity is involved and that, in one way or another, symbols are being interpreted. That imposes a first limitation on our use of the word. We are not concerned with a part of the intestinal tract, nor are we concerned with enunciation, with speaking something out loud. A second limitation is need, because we shall not consider—except for some points of comparison—the interpretation, clairvoyant or otherwise, of natural signs such as stars hands, or faces. We shall limit ourselves to one kind of readable symbol, the kind which men invent for the purposes of communication—the words of human language. This eliminates the reading of other artificial signs such as the pointers on dials of physical apparatus, thermometers, gauges, speedometers, and so forth.

  Henceforth, then, you must read the word "reading," as it occurs in this text, to refer to the process of interpreting or understanding what presents itself to the senses in the form of words or other sensible marks. This is not arbitrary legislation about what the word

  "reading" means. It is simply a matter of defining our problem, which reading the in the sense of receiving communication.

  Unfortunately, that is not simple do do, as you would realize at once if someone asked:

  "What about listening? Isn't that receiving communication, too?" I shall subsquently discuss the relation of reading and listening, for the rules of good reading are for the most part the rules of good listening, though perhaps harder to apply in the latter case.

  Suffice it for the present to distinguish reading from listening by restricting the communication being received to what is written and printed rather than spoken.

  I shall try to use the word "reading" in the limited and special sense noted. But I know that I will not succeed without exception. It will be impossible to avoid using the word in some of its other senses. Sometimes I sha;; be thoughtful enough to mention explicitly that I am shifting the meaning. Other times I may suppose that the context is sufficient warning to you. Infrequently ( I hope ) I may shift the meaning without being aware of it myself.

  Be stout, gentle reader, for you are just beginning. What has gone before is just preliminary to finding out the even narrower sense in which the word "reading" will be used. We must now face the problem which the first chapter indicated. We must distinguish between the sense in which you can read this book, for instance, and are now doing so, and the sense in which you may learn from it to read better or diferently than you now can.

  Notice that I said "better" or "differently." The one word points to diffrence in degrees of ability, the other to a distinction in kinds. I suppose we shall find that the better reader can also do a different kind of reading. The poorer can probably do only one kind—the simplest kind. Let us first examine the range of ability in reading to determine what we mean by "better" and "poorer."

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  One obvious fact shows the existence of a wide range of degrees in ability to read. It is that reading begins in the primary grades and runs through every level of the educational system. Reading is the first of the three R's. It is first because we have to learn to read in order to learn by reading. Since what we have to learn, as we ascend in our education, becomes more difficult or complex, we must improve our ability to read proportionately.

  Literacy is everywhere the primary mark of education, but it has many degrees, from a grammar-school diploma, or even less, up to a bachelor's degree or a Ph.D. But, in his recent commentary on American democracy, called Of Human Fredom, Jacques Barzun cautions us not to be misled by the boast that we have the most literate population in the world. "Literacy in this sense is not education; it is not even 'knowing how to read' in the sense of taking in quickly and correctly the message of the printed page, to say nothing of exercising a critical judgement upon it."

  Supposedly, gradations i
n reading go along with graduations from one educational level to another. In the light of what we know about American education today, that supposition is not well founded. In France it is still true that the candidate for the doctor's degree must show an ability to read sufficient to admit him to that higher circle of literacy. What the French call explication de texte is an art which must be practiced at every educational level and in which improvement must be made before one moves up the scale. But in this country there is often little discenible difference between the explication which a high-school student would give and one by a college senior or even a doctoral candidate. When the task is to read a book, the high-school students and college freshmen are often better, if only because they are less thoroughly spoiled by bad habits.

  The fact that there ie something wrong with American education, so far as reading is concerned, means only that the gradations have become obscure for us, not that theydo not exist. Our task is to remove that obscurity. To make the distinction in grades of reading sharper, we must define the criteria of better and worse.

  What are the criteria? I think I have already suggested what they are, in the previous chapter. Thus, we say that one man is a better reader than another if he can read more difficult material. Anyone would agree, if Jones is able to read only such things as newspaper and magazines, whereas Brown can read the best current nonfiction books, such as Einstein and Infeld's Evolution of Physics or Hoben's Mathematics for the Millions, that Brown has more ability than Jones. Among readers at the Jones level, further discrimination may be made between those who cannot rise abouve the tabloids and those who can master The New York Times. Between the Jones and the Brown group, there are still others measured bythe better and worse magazines, better and worse current fiction, or by nonfiction books of a more popular nature than Einstein or Hogben, such as Gunther's Inside Europe or Heister's An American Doctor's Odyssey.