CHAPTER SEVEN
From Many Rules to One Habit
While you are in the stage of learning to read, you have to go over a book more than once. If it is worth reading at all, it is worth three reading at least.
Lest you become unduly alarmed at the demands that are going to be made of you, let me hasten to say that the expert reader can do these three reading at the same time. What I have called "three readings" need not be three in time. They are, strictly speaking, three in manner. They are three ways of reading a book. To be well read, each book should be read in these three ways each time it is read. The number of distinct times you can read something profitably depends partly on the book and prtly on you as a reader, your resourcefulness and industry.
Only at the beginning, I repeat, the three ways of reading a book must be done separately. Before you become expert, you cannot coalesce a lot of different acts into one complex, harmonious performance. You cannot telescope the different parts of the job so that they run into one another and fuse intimately. Each deserves your full atttention while you are doing it. After you have practice the parts seprately, you not only can do each with greater facility and less attention but you can also gradually put them toether into a smoothly running whole.
I am saying nothing here which is not common knowledge about learning a complex skill. I merely want to be sure you realize that learning to read is at least as complex as learning to typewrite or leaning to play tennis. If you can recall your patience in any other learning experience you have had, perhaps you will be more tolerant of a tutor who is shortly going to enumerate a long list of rules for reading.
The experimental psychologists have put the learning process under glass for any to look at. The learning curves they have plotted, during countless laboratory studies of every sort of manual skill, show graphically the rate of progress from one state of practice to another. I want to call your attention to two of their findings.
The first is called the "learning plateau." During a series of days in which a performance, such as typewriting or receiving the Morse code telegraphically, is practiced, the curve shows improvement both in speed and in the reduction of errors. Then suddenly the curve flattens out. For some days, the learner cannot make any advances. His hard work seems to yield no substantial effects either in speed or accuracy. The rule that every bit of practice makes a little more perfect appears to break down. Then, just as suddenly, the learners gets off the plateau and starts to climb again. The curve which records his achievements again shows steady progress from day to day. And this continues, though perhaps with a slightly diminishing accelaration, until the learner his another plateau.
Plateau are not found in all learning curves, but only in those which record progress in gaining a complex skill. In fact, the more complex the performance to be learned, the more frequency such stationary periods appear. The psychologists have discovered, however, that learning is going on during these periods, though it is hidden in the sense of having no manifest practice effects at the time. The discovery that "higher units" of skills are then being formed is the second of the two findings I referred to before. While the learner is improving in typing single letters, he makes progress in speed and accuracy. But he has to form the habit of typing syllables and words as units, and then later phrases and sentences.
The stage during which the learner is passing from a lower to a higher unit of skill appears to be one of no advance in efficiency, because the learner must develop a certain number of "word units" before he can perform at that level. When he has enough of these units mastered, he makes a new spurt of progress until he has to pass to a higher unit of operation. What at first consisted of a larger number of single acts—the typing of each individual letter—becomes finally one complex act—the typing of a whole sentence. The habit is perfectly fromed only when the learner has reached the highest unit of operation. Where before there seemed to be many habits, which it was difficult to make work together, now there is one habit by virtue of the organization of all the separate acts into one smoothly flowing performance.
The laboratory findings merely confirm what I think most of us know already from our own experience, though we might not have recognized the plateau as a period in which hidden learning is going on. If you are learning to play tennis, you have to learn how to serve the ball, how to receive your opponent's service or return, how to play net, or at the mid-court and base line. Each of these is part of the total skill. At first, each must be mastered separately, because there is a technique for doing each. But none of these by itself is the game of tennis. You have to pass from these lower units to the higher unit in which all the separate skills are put together and become one complex skill. You have to be able to move from one act to another so rapidly and automatically that our attention is free for the strategy of play.
Similarly in the case of learning to drive a car. At first, you learn to steer, shift gears, apply the brake. Gradually these units of activity are mastered and lose their separateness in the proces of driving. You have learned to drive when you have learned to do all these together without thinking about them.
The man who has done one experience in acquiring a complex skill knows that he need not fear the array of rules which present themselves at the beginning of something to be learned. He knows that the does not have to worry about all the different acts, in whch he must become seprately proficient, are going to work together. Knowing that the plateau is learning are periods of hidden progress may prevent discouragement. Higher units of activity are getting formed even if they do not increase one's efficiency all at once.
The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not the plurality of distinct habits. The part acts coalesce and telescope as each reaches the stage of automatic execution. When all the subordinate acts can be done more or less automatically, you have formed the habit of the whole performance. Then you can think about beating your opponent in tennis, or driving your car to the country. This is an important point. At the beginning, the learner pays attention to himself and his skill in the separate acts. When the acts have lost their separateness in the skill of the whole performance, the learner can at last pay attention to the goal which the technique he has acquired enables him to reach.
What is true of tennis or driving holds for reading, not simply the grammar-school rudiments, but the highest type of reading for understanding. Anyone who recognizes that such reading is a complex activity will acknowledge this. I have made all this explicit so that you will not think that the demands to be made here are any more exorbitant or exasperating than in other fields of learning.
Not only will you become proficient in following each of the rules, you will gradually cease to concern yourself with the rules as distinct and the separate acts they regulate. You will be doing a larger job, confident that the parts will take care of themselves. You will no longer pay so much attention to yourself as a reader, and be able to put your mind wholy on the book you are reading.
But for the present we must pay attention to the separate rules. These rules fall into three main groups, each dealing with one of the three indispensable ways a book must be read. I shall now try to explain why there must be three readings.
In the first place, you must be able to grasp what is being offered as knowledge. In the second place, you must judge whether what is being offered is really acceptable to you as knowledge. In the other words, there is first the task of
understanding the book, and second the job of criticizing it. These two are quite separate, as you will see more and more.
The process of understanding can be further divided. To understand a book, you must approach it, first, as a whole, having a unity and a structure of parts; and, second, in terms of its elements, its units of language and thought.
Thus, there are three distinct readings, which can be rariously named and described as follows:
I. The first reading can be called structural or analytic. Here the reader proceeds from the whole to its parts.
II. The second reading can be called interpretative or synthetic. Here the reader proceeds from the parts to the whole.
III. The third reading can be called critical or evaluative. Here the reader judges the author, and decides whether he agrees or disagrees.
In each of these three main divisions, there are several steps to be taken, and hence several rules. You have already being introduced to three of the four rules for doing the second reading: (1) you must discover and interpret the most important words in the book; (2) you must do the same for the most important sentences, and (3) similarly for the paragraph which express arguments. The fourth rule, which I have not yet mentioned, is that you must know which of his problems the author solved, and which he failed on.
To accomplish the first reading you must know (1) what kind of book it is; that is, the subject matter it is about. You must also know (2) what the book as a whole is trying to say; (3) into what parts that whole is divided, and (4) what the main problems are that the author is trying to solve. Here, too, there are four steps and four rules.
Notice that the parts which you come to by analyzing the whole in this first reading are not exactly the same as the parts you start with to construct the whole in the second reading. In the former case, the parts are the ultimate divisions of the author's treatment of his subject matter or problem. In the latter case, the parts are such things as terms, propositions, and syllogisms; that is, the author's ideas, assertions, and arguments.
The third reading also involves a nmumber of steps. There are first several general rules about how you must undertake the task of critism, and then there are a number of critical points you can make-- four in all. The rules for the third reading tell you what points can be made and how to make them.
In this chapter, I am going to discuss all the rules in a general way. Later chapters take them up separately. If you wish to see a single, compact tabulation of all these rules you will find it on pages 266-7, at the opening of Chapter Fourteen.
Though you will unerstand it better later, it is possible to show you here how these various reading will coalesce, especially the first two. That has already been somewhat indicated by the fact that both have to do with whole and parts in some sense. Knowing what the whole book is about and what its main divisions are will help you discover its leading terms and propositions. If you can discover what the chief contentions of the author are and how the supports these by argument and evidence, you will be aided in the determining the general tenor of his treatment and its major divisions.
The lst step in the first reading is to define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve. The last step in the second reading is to decide whether the author has solved these problems, or which he has and which he has not. Thus you see how closely the first two readings are related, converging as it were in their final steps.
As you become more expert, you will be able to do these two readings together. The better you can do them together, the more they will help each other get done. But the third reading will never become, infact never can become, absolutely simultaneous with the other two. Even the most expert reader must do the first two and the third somewhat separately. Understanding an author must always precede criticizing or judging him.
I have met many "readers" who do the third raeding first. Worse than that, they fail to do the first two readings at all. They pick up a book and soon begin to tell you what is wrong with it. They are full of opinions which the book is merely a pretext for expressing. They can hardly be called "readers" at all. They are more like people you know who think a conversation is an occasion for talking but not listening. Not only are such people are not woth your effort in talking, but they are usually not worth listening either.
The reason why the first two readings can grow together is that both are attempts to understand the book, whereas the third remains distinct because it undertakes criticism after understanding is reached. But even after the first two readings are habitually fused, they can still be analytically separated. This is important. If you had to check your reading of a book, you would have to divide thw whole process into its parts. You might have to re-examine separately each step you took, though at the time you did not take it separately, so habitual had the process of reading become.
For this reason, it is important to remember that the various rules remain distinct from one another as rules even though they tend to lose their distinctness for you though causing you to form a single, complicated habit. They cound not help you check your reading unless you could consult them as so many different rules. The teacher of English composition, going over a paper with a student and explaining his marks, points to this or that rule the student violated. At that time, the student must be reminded of the different rules, but the teacher does not waant him to write with a rule sheet before him. He wants him to write well habitually, as if the rules were part of his nature. The same is true of reading.
Now there is one further complication. Not only must you read a book three ways (and at the beginning that may mean three times), but you must also be able to read two or more books in relation to one another in order to read any one of them well. I do not mean that you must be able to read any collection of books together. I am thinking only of books which are related because they deal with the same subject matter or treat of the same group of problems. If you cannot read such books in relation to one another, you probably cannot read any one of them very well. If the authors are saying the same or different things, it they are agreeing or disagreeing, what assurance can you have that you understand one of them unless you recognize such overlappings and divergences, such agreements and disagreements?
This point calls for a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic reading. I hope these two words are not mislead ing. I know of no other way to name the difference. By "intrinsic reading" I mean reading a book in itself, quite apart from all other books. By "extrinsic reading" I mean reading a book in the light of other books. The other books may, in some cases, be only reference books, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs. They may be secondary books, which are useful commentaries or digests. They may be other great books. Another extrinsic aid to reading is relevant experience. The experiences to which one may have to refer in order to understand a book may be either of the sort that occur only in a laboratory, or of the sort which men possess in the course of their daily lives. Intrinsic and extrinsic reading tend to fuse in the actual proc--ss of understanding, or even criticizing, a book.
What I said before about being able to read related books in relation to one another applies especially to the great books. Frequently, in lecturing about education, I refer to the great books. Members of the audience usually write to me later to ask for a list of such books. I tell them to get either the list which the American Library Association has published under the title Classics of the Western World, or the list printed by St. John's College, in Annapolis, Maryland, as part of its announcement. Later I am informed by these people that they have great difficulties in reading the books. The enthusiasm which prompted them to send for the list and to start reading has given way to a hopeless feeling of inadequacy.
There are two reasons for this. One, of course, is that they do not know how to read. But that is not all. The other reason is that they think they should be able to understand the first book they pick out, without having read the others to which it is closely related. They may try to read The Federalist Papers without having read the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Or they may try all these without having read Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau's The Social Contract, and John Locke's essay Of Civil Government.
Not only are many of the great books related, but they have actually been written in a certain order which should not be ignored. A later writer has been influenced by an earlier one. If you read the earlier writer first, he may help you understand the later book. Reading related books in relation to one another and in an order which renders the later ones more intelligible is a basic rule of extrinsic reading.
I shall discuss the extrinsic aids to reading in Chapter Fourteen. Until then, we shall be concerned only with the rules of intrinsic reading. Again, I must remind you that we have to make such separations in the process of learning, even though the learning is completed only when the separations disappear. The expert reader has other books in mind, or relevant experiences, while he is reading a particular book to which these other things are related. But tor the present, you must pay attention to the steps in reading a single book, as if that book were a whole world in itself. I do not mean, of course, that your own experience can ever be excluded from the process of understanding what a book is saying. That much of extrinsic reference beyond the book is absolutely indispensable, as we shall see. After all, you cannot enter the world of a single book without bringing your mind along and with it the whole of your past experience.
These rules of intrinsic reading apply not only to reading a book but to taking a course of lectures. I am sure that a person who could read a whole book well could get more out of a course of lectures than most people do, in or out of college. The two situations are largely the same, though following a series of lectures may call for a greater exercise of memory or note taking. There is one other difficulty about the lectures. You can read a book three times if you have to read it separately in each of three ways. That is not possible with lectures. Lectures may be all right for those who are expert in receiving communication, but they are liard on the untrained.
This suggests an educational principle: perhaps it would be a sound plan to be sure that people knew how to read a whole book before they were encouraged to attend a course of lectures. It does not happen that way in college now. It does not happen in adult education either. Many people think that taking a course of lectures is a short cut to getting what they are not able to read in books. But it is not a short cut to the same goal. In fact, they might as well be going in the opposite direction.
There is one limitation on the applicability of these rules, which should be already obvious. I have repeatedly stressed that they aim to help you read a whole book. At least that is their primary aim, and they would be misused if applied mainly to excerpts or small parts out of context. You cannot learn to read by doing it fifteen minutes a day in the manner prescribed by the guidebook which goes along with the Harvard Classics.
It is not merely that fifteen minutes a day is somewhat
insufficient but that you should not read a little piece here and a little part there, as the guidebook recommends. The Five-Foot Shelf contains many of the great books, although it also includes some that are not so great. In many cases, whole books are included; in others, substantially large excerpts. But you are not told to read a whole book or a large part of one. You are directed to taste a little nectar here and sniff a little honey there. That will make you a literary butterfly, not a competent reader.
For example, one day you are to read six pages from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; on the next, eleven pages of Milton's early lyrics, and on the next, ten pages of Cicero on friendship. Another sequence of days finds you reading eight pages by Hamilton from The Federalist Papers, then remarks by Burke on taste running fifteen pages, and then twelve pages from Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. The only thing which determines the order is the historic connection between the thing to be read and a certain day of the month. But the calendar is hardly a relevant consideration.
Not only are the excerpts far too short for a sustained effort of reading, but the order in which one thing follows another makes it impossible to grasp any real whole in itself or to understand one thing in relation to another. This plan for reading the Harvard Classics must make the great books about as unintelligible as a college course under the elective system. Perhaps the plan was devised to honor Dr, Eliot, the sponsor of both the elective system and the Five Foot Shelf. In any case, it offers us a good object lesson of what not to do if we wish to avoid intellectual St. Vitus's dance.
There is one further limitation on the use of these rules. We are here concerned with only one of the major purposes in reading, and not the other—with reading to learn, and not with reading for enjoyment. The purpose is not only in the reader but in the writer as well. We are concerned with books which aim to teach, which seek to convey knowledge. In the early chapters I distinguished between reading for knowledge and for amusement, and restricted our discussion to the former. We must now go a step further and distinguish two large classes of books which differ according to the intention of the author as well as in the. satisfaction they can afford readers. We must do this because our rules apply strictly to one type of book and one type of purpose in reading.
There are no recognized, conventional names for these two classes of books. I am tempted to call one sort poetry or fiction, and the other exposition or science. But the word "poetry" today usually means lyrics, instead of naming all imaginative literature, or what is sometimes called belles-lettres. Similarly, the word "science" tends to exclude history and philosophy, though both of these are expositions of knowledge. Names aside, the difference is grasped in terms of the author's intention: the poet, or any writer who is a fine artist, aims to please or delight, just as the musician and the sculptor do, by making beautiful things to be beheld. The scientist, or any man of knowledge who is a liberal artist, aims to instruct by speaking the truth.
The problem of learning how to read poetical works well is at least as difficult as the problem of learning to read tor knowledge. It is also radically different. The rules which I have briefly enumerated and will presently discuss in detail are directions for reading to learn, not for adequately enjoying a work of fine art. The rules for reading poetry would differ necessarily. They would take a book as long as this to expound and explain.
In their general ground plan, they might resemble the three divisions of the rules for reading scientific or expository works. There would be rules concerning the appreciation of the whole in terms of its being a unified structure of parts. There would be rules tor discerning the linguistic and imaginative elements that constitute a poem or story. There would be rules for making critical judgments about the goodness or badness of the work, rules which helped develop good taste and discrimination. Beyond that, however, the parallelism would cease, because the structure of a story and a science are so different; the linguistic elements are differently used to evoke imagination and to convey thought; the criteria of criticism are not the same when It is beauty rather than truth that is to be judged.
T'he category of books which delight or amuse has as many levels of quality in it as the category of books which instruct. What is called "light fiction" requires as little ability to read, as little skill or activity, as books which are merely informative, and do not require us to make an effort to understand. We can read the stories in a mediocre magazine as passively as we read its articles.
Just as there are expository books which merely repeat or digest what is better learned from the primary sources of enlightenment, so there is secondhand poetry of all sorts. I do not mean simply the twice-told tale, for all good tales are many times told. I mean rather the narrative or lyric which does not alter our sentiments or mold our imagination. In both fields, the great books, the primary books, are alike in being original works and our betters. As in the one case the great book is able to elevate our understanding, so in the other the great book inspires us, deepens our sensitivity to all human values, increases our humanity.
In both fields of literature, only books which are better than we are require skill and activity in reading. We can read the other stuff passively and with little technical proficiency. The rules for reading imaginative literature, therefore, aim primarily to help people read the great works of belles-lettres—the great epic poems, the great dramas, novels, and lyrics—just as the rules for reading to learn aim primarily at the great works of history, science, and philosophy.
I regret that both sets of rules cannot be adequately treated in a single volume, not only because both kinds of reading are necessary for a decent literacy, but because the best reader is one who possesses both sorts of skill. The two arts of reading penetrate and support each other. We seldom do one sort of reading without having to do a little of the other at the same time. Books do not come as neat and pure packages of science or poetry.
The greatest books most frequently combine these two basic dimensions of literature. A Platonic dialogue such as The Republic must be read both as a drama and as an intellectual discourse. A poem such as Dante's The Diving Comedy is not only a magnificent story but a philosophical disquisition. Knowledge cannot be conveyed without the supporting texture of imagination and sentiment; and feeling and imagery are inveterately infected with thought.
It remains the case, however, that the two arts of reading are distinct. It would be thoroughly confusing to proceed as if the rules we were going to expound applied equally to poetry and science. Strictly, they apply only to science or books conveying knowledge. I can think of two ways to compensate for the deficiency of this limited treatment of reading. One is to devote a chapter later to the problem of reading imaginative literature. Perhaps, after you have become acquainted with the detailed rules for reading non-fiction books, I will be possible to indicate briefly the analogous rules for reading fiction and poetry. I shall try to do this in Chapter Fifteen. In fact, I shall go further and there make the effort to generalize the rules so that they apply to reading anything. The other remedy is to suggest books on the reading of poetry or fiction. I shall name some here, and more later in Chapter Fifteen.
Books which treat of the appreciation or criticism of poetry are themselves scientific books. They are expositions of a certain kind of knowledge, sometimes called "literary criticism"; viewed more generally, they are books like this one, trying to instruct in an art—in fact, a different aspect of the same art, the art of reading. Now if this book helps you learn how to read any kind of expository book, you can read these other books by yourself and be helped by them to read poetry or belles-lettres.
The great traditional book of this sort is Aristotle's Poetics. More recently, there are the essays of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and two books by Mr. I. A. Richards, The Principles of Criticism and Practical Criticism. The Critical Essays of Edgar Allan Poe are worth consulting, especially the one on "The Poetic Principle." In his analysis of The Poetic Experience, Fr. Thomas Gilby illuminates the object and the manner of poetic knowledge. William Empson has written about Seven Types of Ambiguity in a way that is particularly helpful for reading lyric poetry. And recently, Gordon Gerould has published a book on How to Read Fiction. If you look into these books, they will lead you to others.
In general, you will find the greatest help from those books which not only formulate the rules but exemplify them in practice by discussing literature appreciatively and critically. Here, more than in the case of science, you need to be guided by someone who actually shows you how to read by doing it for you. Mr. Mark Van Doren has just published a book called simply Shakespeare. It gives you his reading of the plays of Shakespeare. There are no rules of reading in it, but he provides you with a model to follow. You may even be able to detect the rules which governed him by seeing them in operation. There is one other book I would like to mention, because it bears on the analogy between reading imaginative and expository literature. Poetry and Mathematics by Scott Buchanan illuminates the parallel between the structure of science and the form of fiction.
You may object to all this. You may say that I have forced a distinction where none can be drawn. You may say that there is only one way of reading all books, or that any book must be read in every way, if there are many ways.
I have anticipated this objection by pointing out already that most books have several dimensions, certainly a poetic and a scientific one. I have even said that most books, and especially the great books, must be read in both ways. But that does not mean that the two kinds of reading must be confused, or that we must entirely ignore our primary purpose in reading a book or the author's chief intention in writing it. I think most authors know whether they are primarily poets or scientists. Certainly the great ones do. Any good reader should be aware of what he wants wherr he goes to a book: knowledge primarily, or delight.
The further point is simply that one should satisfy one's purpose by going to a book written with a similar intention. If one seeks knowledge, it seems wiser to read books which offer to instruct, if there be such, than books which tell stories. If one seeks knowledge of a certain subject matter, one had better go to books which treat of it rather than others. It seems misguided to read a history of Rome, if it is astronomy one wishes to learn.
This does not mean that one and the same book cannot be read in different ways and according to different purposes. The author may have more than one intention, although I think one is always likely to be primary and to dictate the obvious character of the book. Just as a book may have a primary and secondary character—as the dialogues of Plato are primarily philosophical and secondarily dramatic, and The Divine Comedy is primarily narrative and secondarily philosophical—so the reader may deal with the book accordingly. He may even, if he wishes, invert the order of the author's purposes, and read Plato's dialogues mainly as drama, and The Divine Comedy chiefly as philosophy. This is not without parallel in other fields. A piece of music intended to be enjoyed as a work of fine art can be used to put the baby to sleep. A chair intended to be sat upon can be placed behind ropes in a museum and admired as a thing of beauty.
Such duplicity of purpose and such inversions of primary and secondary character leave the main point unchanged. Whatever you do in the way of reading, whichever purpose you put first or second, you must know what you are doing and obey the rules for doing that sort of thing. There is no error in reading a poem as if it were philosophy, or science as if it were poetry, so long as you know which you are doing at a given time and how to do it well. You will not suppose, then, that you are doing something else, or that it makes no difference how you do whatever you are doing.
There are, however, two errors which must be avoided. One of them I will call "purism." This is the error of supposing that a given book can be read in only one way. It is an error because books are not pure in character, and that in turn is due to the fact that the human mind, which writes or reads them, is rooted in the senses and imagination and moves or is moved by emotions and sentiment.
The second error I call "obscurantism." This is the error of supposing that all books can be read in only one way. Thus, there is the extreme of estheticism, which regards all books as if they were poetry, refusing to distinguish other types of literature and other modes of reading. The other extreme is that of intellectualism, which treats all books as if they were instructive, as if nothing could be found in a book except knowledge. Both errors are epitomized in a single line by Keats—"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—which may contribute to the effect of his ode, but which is false as a principle of criticism or as a guide to reading books.
You have been sufficiently warned now what to expect, and what not, from the rules which the following chapters will discuss in detail. You will not be able to misuse them very much, because you will find that they do not work outside their proper and limited field of applicability. The man who sells you a frying pan seldom tells you that you will not find it useful as a refrigerator. He knows you can be trusted to find that out for yourself.
