September 20, 2006 (3): How I Read

If I am to make an issue about method, perhaps this would be a good time for me to say something about my method of reading, which seems to be my own approach to a dialectical synthesis of the physical and digital worlds. I used to apply this method to reading I knew would be "difficult" (like the aforementioned Anthony Giddens); but these days I seem to apply it to everything, even (from time to time) fiction. It all goes back to my days of writing term papers in high school, when we were taught to take notes on 3x5 cards based on all the background material we would read. I suppose there are those who tried to do this with HyperCard, but I was not one of them. No, with all due respect to the "Evil Empire" of Microsoft, it took PowerPoint to give me the sort of 3x5-card++ that I wanted, supplemented with the ability to incorporate images, tables, and (back from HyperCard days) hyperlinks.

So when I read a book that I own, there are several ways I mark up the pages and I use two colors. I use black for points of agreement and attempts to carry an idea further than the author, and I use red for points of disagreement. I underline passages that I feel are worth remembering, usually at the sentence level. I add comments in the margin space to the extent that they fit. If they require more space, I type them into Word, assign a number, which I then write into the margin, print the comment on a separate sheet of paper, and tuck it into the book at the right place. When I finish a chapter (that is the usual granularity), I transcribe everything onto PowerPoint "slides." That means that I manually type out the passages I have underlined and transcribe the marginal notes. I try to collect these in useful groups, labeled by the slide Header.

Why? I have two major reasons:

1. I have now created an object that can be easily searched in the digital domain; and, because I record both quotations and my own notes, I have a certain amount of control over what that search is likely to find.
2. I find manually typing to be a valuable intellectual exercise (just as Stravinsky claimed that he would copy out all the instrumental parts of a new composition because that was when he really began to understood what he had composed). In other words any damn fool can put marks on the pages of a book, but those marks are not necessarily indications of analytic thinking. Writing (even copying), on the other hand, usually gets beyond the damn-fool attention span and requires a more serious commitment to understanding.

Does it work? Ever since I started this practice, I have come to use the Windows Search tool more and more heavily; and I am seldom disappointed. As far as the second reason is concerned, I am sometimes cross with myself for "taking too many notes;" but I still stick with the program. Although my evidence is purely anecdotal, I feel I retain a lot of more of what I read from doing this. In invoke a metaphor introduced by Mortimer Adler, I feel it is the closest I can come to having a conversation with the author, which is quite exciting when the author has been dead for a couple of hundred years!