HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  I have emphasized the notion of technical vocabulary, but you must not take this too narrowly. The relatively small set of words which express the author's main ideas, his leading concepts, constitutes his special vocabulary. They are the words which carry his analysis. If he is making an original communication, some of these words are likely to be used by him in a very special way, although he may use others in a fashion which has become traditional in that field. In either case, these are the words which are most important for him. They should be important for you as a reader also, but in addition any other word whose meaning is not clear is important for you.

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  The trouble with most readers is that they simply do not pay enough attention to words to locate their difficulties. They fail to distinguish the words they do not understand sufficiently from those they do. All the things I have suggested to help you find the important words in a book will be of no avail unless you make a deliberate effort to note the words you must work on to find the terms they convey. The reader who fails to ponder, or at least to mark, the words he does not understand is likely to end up as badly as the locomotive engineer who drives past red signals in the hope .that the traffic congestion will straighten itself out.

  If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that all its words will not be equally intelligible. If you proceed as if they were all ordinary words, all on the same level of general intelligibility as the words of a newspaper article, you will not make the first step toward an interpretative reading. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand ,it.

  I know how inveterately most of us are addicted to pas' sive reading. The outstanding fault of the passive reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author. Some years ago Professor Malcolm Sharp, of the University of Chicago Law School, and I gave a special course for students who were planning to study law. One of our primary aims was to teach them how to read and write. A lawyer should possess these abilities. The faculty of the Law School had come to suspect that the colleges could not be counted on to develop these skills. Our experience with these students, who had reached their junior year, showed their suspicion to be well founded.

  We soon discovered how passively they read. John Locke's second essay Of Civil Government had been assigned, and they had had several weeks in which to read about a hundred pages. The class met. Mr. Sharp and I asked relatively simple, leading questions about Locke's views on government, the relation of natural and civil rights, the nature of liberty, and so forth. They answered these questions, but not in a way which showed any acquaintance with Locke. They could have made the same replies if they had never opened Locke's essay.

  Had they read the book? They assured us they had. We even inquired whether they had make the mistake of reading the first essay, rather than the second. There was no mistake, it seemed. The only thing left to do was to show them that, though they may have looked at every page, they had not read the book.

  I went to the board and asked them to call out the most important words in the essay. I said I wanted either those words which were most important for Locke or those which they had trouble in understanding. At first there was no response. Only after I put such words as "natural," "civil," "property," and "equality," on the board was I able to get them to contribute. We finally did get a list which included "liberty," "despotism,"

  "consent (of the governed)," "rights," "justice," and so forth.

  Before I went further, I paused to ask whether these words were utterly strange to them.

  No, they were all familiar and ordinary words, they said. One student pointed out that some of these words occurred in the Declaration of Independence. It was said there to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. They found other words, such as "despotism," "usurpation," and "liberty,"

  which they thought Locke and the founding fathers probably used in a similar way.

  That was our cue. We agreed that the writers of the Declaration and the framers of the Constitution had made these words extremely popular in the tradition of American political discussion. Mr. Sharp added that many of them had probably read Locke's essay and had followed his usage of them. How did Locke use them? What were their meanings, not in general, not in popular speech, but in Locke's political theory, and in the great American documents which may have been influenced by Locke?

  I went to the board again to write down the meaning! of the words as they suggested them. But few suggestions were forthcoming, and seldom did a student offer a set of meanings. Few had discovered the fundamental ambiguity of the important words. Mr.

  Sharp and I then listed the meanings of the words, not one meaning for each, but several. By contrasting the meanings of "natural" and "civil," we tried to show them Locke's distinctions between natural and civil equality, natural and civil liberty, and natural and civil rights.

  At the end of the hour, I asked them whether they still thought that they had read the book. A little sheepishly now they admitted that perhaps they hadn't. They had, of course, read it in the way they read the newspaper or a textbook. They had read it passively, without any attention to words and meanings. For the purpose of understanding what Locke had to say that was just the same as not reading it at all. Here were a group of future lawyers who did not know the meaning of the leading words in the Declaration of Independence or the preamble to the Constitution.

  My point in telling this story is to show that until passive reading is overcome, the reader proceeds as if he knew what all the words meant, especially if he is reading something in which the important words also happen to be words in popular usage. Had these students developed the habit of active reading, they would have noted the words I have mentioned. They would have known, in the first place, that such words are not only popular but belong to the technical vocabulary of political theory. Recognizing that, they would, in the second place, have wondered about their technical meanings.

  And finally, if they had tried to determine their significance, they would have found Locke using these words in several senses. Then they might have realized the need to come to terms with the author.

  I should add that the lesson was learned. With these same students, we subsequently read more difficult books than Locke's essay. They came to class better prepared for discussion, because they had marked the words that made a crucial difference. They had pursued important words through their shifts of meaning. What is more, they were beginning to enjoy a new experience—the active reading of a book. It came a little late in their college life, but most of them gratefully acknowledged that it was better late than never.

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  Remember that spotting the important words is only the beginning of the task. It merely locates the places in the text where you have to go to work. There is another step in carrying out this first rule of interpretative reading. Let us turn to that now. Let us suppose that you have marked the words that trouble you. What next?

  There are two major possibilities. Either the author is using these words in a single sense throughout or he is using them in two or more senses, shifting his meaning from place to place. In the first alternative, the word stands for a single term. A good example of the use of important words so that they are restricted to a single meaning is found in Euclid. In the second alternative, the word stands for several terms. This is the more usual case. It is illustrated by the usage in Locke's essay.

  In the light of these alternatives, your procedure should be as follows. First, try to determine whether the word has one or many meanings. If it has many, try to see whether they are related and how. Finally, note the places where the word is used in one sense or another, and see if the context gives you any clue to the reason for the shift in mean- » ing. This last will enable yo
u to follow the word in its change of meanings with the same flexibility that characterizes the author's usage.

  But, you may complain, everything is clear except the main thing. How does one find out what the meanings are? There is only one answer to the question. I fear you may not think it a very satisfactory one. But patience and practice will show you otherwise. The answer is that you have to discover the meaning of a word you do not understand by using the meanings of all the other words in the context which you do understand. This must be the way, however merry-go-roundish it may seem at first.

  The simplest way to illustrate this is to consider a definition. A definition is stated in words. If you do not understand any of the words used in the definition, you obviously cannot understand the meaning of the word which names the thing being defined. The word "point" is a basic word in geometry. You may think you know what it means, but Euclid wants to be sure you use it in only one way. He tells you what he means by first defining the thing which he is later going to use the word to name. He says: "A point is that which has no parts."

  How does that bring you to terms with him? You know, he assumes, what every other word in the sentence means with sufficient precision. You know that whatever has parts is a complex whole. You know that the opposite of complex is simple. To be simple is the same as to lack parts. You know that the use of the words "is" and "that which"

  means that the thing referred to must be an entity of some sort. You may even know that there are no physical things without parts, and hence that a point, as Euclid speaks of it, cannot be physical.

  This illustration is typical of the process by which you acquire meanings. You operate with meanings you already possess. If every word that was used in a definition had itself to be denned, nothing could ever be defined. If every word in a book you were reading were entirely strange to you, a? it is in the case of a book in a totally foreign lan guage, you could make no prpgress at all.

  I suppose that is what people mean when they say of a book that it's all Greek to them.

  They simply have not tried to understand it. Most of the words in any English book are familiar words. These words surround the strange words, the technical words, the words that may cause the reader some trouble. The surrounding words are the context for the words to be interpreted. The reader has all the materials he needs to do the job.

  I am not pretending the job is an easy one. I am only insisting that it is not an impossible one. If it were, no one could read a book to gain in understanding. The fact that a book can give you new insights or enlighten you indicates that it probably contains words you may not readily understand. If you could not come to understand these words by your own efforts, then the kind of reading we are talking about would be impossible. It would be impossible to pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own operations on a book.

  If it is not impossible—and it is not—then the only solution is the one I have indicated.

  Because you understand something to begin with, you can employ your fund of meanings to interpret the words that challenge you. When you have succeeded, you have elevated yourself in understanding. You have approached or reached the understanding with which the author began.

  There is no rule of thumb for doing this. The process is something like the trial-and-error method of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The more parts you put together, the more easily the remaining parts fit. A book comes to you with a large number of words already in place. A word in place is a term. It is definitely located by the meaning which you and the author share in using it. The remaining words must be put into place. You do this by trying to make them fit this way or that. The better you understand the picture which the words so far in place incompletely reveal, the easier it is to complete the picture by making terms of the remaining words. Each word put into place makes the next adjustment easier.

  You will make errors, of course, in the process. You will think you have managed to find where a word belongs and how it fits, only to discover later that the placement of another word requires you to make a whole series of readjustments. The errors will get corrected because, so long as they are not found out, the picture cannot be completed.

  Once you have had any experience at all in this work of coming to terms, you will soon be able to check yourself. You will know whether you have succeeded or not. You will not blithely think you understand when you do not.

  In comparing a book to a jigsaw puzzle, I have made one assumption that is not simply or universally true. A good puzzle is, of course, one all of whose parts fit. The picture can be perfectly completed. The same is true of the ideally good book. But there are few books of this sort. In proportion as they are good, their terms will be so well made and put together by the author that the reader can do the work of interpretation fruitfully.

  Here, as in the case of every other rule of reading, bad books are less readable than good ones. The rules do not work on them, except to show you how bad they are. If the author uses words ambiguously, you cannot find out precisely what he is trying to say.

  You can only find out that he has not been precise.

  But, you may ask, doesn't an author who uses a word in more than a single sense use it ambiguously? And didn't you say that the usual practice is for authors to use words in several senses, especially their most important words?

  The answer to the second question is Yes, to the first. No. To use a word ambiguously is to use it in several senses Without distinguishing or relating these meanings. (For example, I have probably used the word "important" ambiguously in this chapter, never quite clear as to whether I mean important for the author or important for you.) The author who does that has not made terms which the reader can come to. But the author who distinguishes the several senses in which he is using a critical word and enables the reader to make a responsive discrimination is offering terms.

  You must not forget that one word can represent several terms. One way to remember this is to distinguish between the author's technical vocabulary and his analytical terminology. If you make a list in one column of the important words, and in another of their various meanings, you will see the relation between the vocabulary and the terminology.

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  There are several further complications. In the first place, a word which has several distinct meanings .can be used either in a single sense or in a combination of senses. Let me take the word "reading" again as an example. In some places, I have used it to stand for reading any kind of book. In others, I have used it to stand for reading books which instruct rather than amuse. In still others, I have used it to stand for reading which enlightens rather than informs.

  Now it we symbolize here, as we did before, the three distinct meanings of "reading" by Xa, Xb, and Xc, you can see that the first usage just mentioned is Xabc, the second is Xbc, and the third Xc. In other words, if three meanings are related, one can use a word to stand for all of them, for some of them, or for only one of them at a time. So long as each usage is definite, the word so used is a term.

  In the second place, there is the problem of synonyms. You know in general that synonyms are words which have the same meaning or closely related shades of meaning. A pair of synonyms is exactly the opposite of a single word used in two ways.

  Synonyms are two words used in the same way. Hence one and the same term can be represented by two or more words used synonymously.

  We can indicate this symbolically as follows. Let X and V be two different words, such as "enlightenment" and "in- sight." Let the letter a stand for the same meaning which each can express, namely, a gain in understanding. Then Xa and Ya represent the same term, though they are distinct as words. When I speak of reading "for insight" and reading "for enlightenment," I am referring to the same kind of reading, because the two phrases are being used with the same meaning. The words are different, but there is only one term here for you as a reader to grasp.

  You can see why this is important. If you supposed
that every time an author changed his words, he was shifting his terms, you would make as great an error as to suppose that every time he used the same words, the terms remained the same. Keep this in mind when you list the author's vocabulary and terminology in separate columns. You will find two relationships. On the one hand, a single word may be related to several terms.

  On the other, a single term may be related to several words.

  That this is generally the case results from the nature of language in relation to thought.

  A dictionary is a record of the usage of words. It shows how men have used tlie same word to refer to different things, and different words to refer to the same thing. The reader's problem is to know what the author is doing with words at any place in the book. The dictionary may help sometimes, but if the writer departs in the least from common usage, the reader is on his own.

  In the third place, and finally, there is the matter of phrases. A phrase, as you know, is a group of words which does not express a complete thought as a sentence does. If the phrase is a unit, that is, if it is a whole which can be the subject or predicate of a sentence, it is like a single word. Like a single word, it can refer to something being talked about in some way.

  It follows, therefore, that a term can be expressed by a phrase as well as by a word. And all the relations which exist between words and terms hold also between terms and phrases. Two phrases may express the same terms, and one phrase may express several terms, according to the way its constituent words are used.

  In general, a phrase is less likely to be ambiguous than a word. Because it is a group of words, each of which is in the context of the others, the single words are more likely to have restricted meanings. That is why a writer is likely to substitute a fairly elaborate phrase for a single word if he wants to be sure that you get his meaning.

  One illustration should suffice. To be sure that you come to terms with me about reading, I substitute the phrase "reading for enlightenment" for the single word