How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (12 page)

The United States Constitution is an interesting, practical document, and a very well-organized piece of writing. If you examine it, you should have no difficulty in finding its major parts. They are pretty clearly indicated, though you have to do some thinking to make the main divisions. Here is a suggested outline of the document:

FIRST: The Preamble, setting forth the purpose(s) of the Constitution; SECOND: The first Article, dealing with the legislative department of the government; THIRD: The second Article, dealing with the executive department of the government; FOURTH: The third Article, dealing with the judicial department of the government; FIFTH: The fourth Article, dealing with the relationship between the state governments and the federal government; SIXTH: The fifth, sixth, and seventh Articles, dealing with the amendment of the Constitution, its status as the supreme law of the land, and provisions for its ratifications; SEVENTH: The first ten amendments, constituting the Bill of Rights; EIGHTH: The remaining amendments up to the present day.

Those are the major divisions. Now let us outline one of them, the Second, comprising the Constitution's first Article. Like most of the other Articles, it is divided into Sections. Here is a suggested outline.

II, 1 : Section 1, establishing legislative powers in a Congress of the United States, divided into two bodies, a Senate and a House of Representatives;

II, 2: Sections 2 and 3, respectively describing the composition of the House and Senate and stating the qualifications of members. In addition, it is stated that the House has the sole power of impeachment, while the Senate has the sole power of trying impeachments;

II, 3: Sections 4 and 5, having to do with the election of members of both branches of Congress and with the internal organization and affairs of each;

II, 4: Section 6, stating the perquisites and emoluments of members of both branches, and stating one limitation on civil employment of members;

II, 5: Section 7, defining the relationship between the legislative and executive departments of the government and describing the President's veto power;

II, 6: Section 8, stating the powers of Congress; II, 7: Section 9, stating some limitations on the powers outlined in Section 8;

II, 8: Section 10, stating limitations on the powers of the states and the extent to which they must give over certain powers to the Congress.

We could then proceed to make a similar outline of all the other major divisions, and, after completing that, return to outline the Sections in turn. Some of these, for example Section 8 in Article I, would require the identification of many different topics and subtopics.

Of course, this is only one way of doing the job. There are many others. The first three Articles could be grouped together in one major division, for instance; or instead of two divisions with respect to the amendments, more major divisions could be introduced, grouping the amendments according to the problems they dealt with. We suggest that. you try your hand at making your own division of the Constitution into its main parts. Go even further than we did, and try to state the parts of the parts as well. You may have read the Constitution many times, but if you have not applied this rule before, you will find that it reveals much in the document that you never saw.

Here is one more example, again very brief. We have already stated the unity of Aristotle's Ethics. Now let us attempt a first approximation of its structure. The whole is divided into the following main parts: A first, treating of happiness as the end of life, and discussing it in relation to all other practicable goods; a second, treating of the nature of voluntary action, and its relation to the formation of good and bad habits; a third, discussing the various virtues and vices, both moral and intellectual; a fourth, dealing with moral states that are neither virtuous nor vicious; a fifth, treating of friendship; and a sixth and last, discussing pleasure, and completing the account of human happiness begun in the first.

These divisions obviously do not correspond to the ten books of the Ethics. Thus, the first part is accomplished in the first book; the second part runs through Book II and the first half of Book Ill; the third part extends from the rest of Book III through the end of Book VI; the discussion of pleasure occurs at the end of Book VII and again at the beginning of Book X.

We mention this to show you that you need not follow the apparent structure of a book as indicated by its chapter divisions. That structure may, of course, be better than the outline you develop, but it may also be worse; in any event, the point is to make your own outline. The author made his in order to write a good book. You must make yours in order to read it well. If he were a perfect writer and you a perfect reader, it would follow that the two would be the same. In proportion as either of you falls away from perfection, all sorts of discrepancies will inevitably result.

This does not mean that you should ignore chapter headings and sectional divisions made by the author; we did not ignore them in our analysis of the Constitution, although we did not slavishly follow them, either. They are intended to help you, just as titles and prefaces are. But you must use them as guides for your own activity, and not rely on them passively. There are few authors who execute their plan perfectly, but there is often more plan in a good book than meets the eye at first.

The surface can be deceiving. You must look beneath it to discover the real structure.

How important is it to discover that real structure? We think very important. Another way of saying this is to say that Rule 2-the requirement that you state the unity of a book cannot be effectively followed without obeying Rule 3-the requirement that you state the parts that make up that unity.

You might, from a cursory glance at a book, be able to come up with an adequate statement of its unity in two or three sentences. But you would not really know that it was adequate.

Someone else, who had read the book better, might know this, and award you high marks for your efforts. But for you, from your point of view, it would have been merely a good guess, a lucky hit. This is why the third rule is absolutely necessary as a complement to the second one.

A very simple example will show what we mean. A two year-old child, just having begun to talk, might say that "two plus two is four." Objectively, this is a true statement; but we would be wrong to conclude from it that the child knew much mathematics. In fact, the child probably would not know what the statement meant, and so, although the statement by itself was adequate, we would have to say that the child still needed training in the subject. Similarly, you might be right in your guess about a book's main theme or point, but you still need to go through the exercise of showing how and why you stated it as you did. The requirement that you outline the parts of a book, and show how they exemplify and develop the main theme, is thus supportive of your statement of the book's unity.

The Reciprocal Arts of Reading and Writing

In general, the two rules of reading that we have been discussing look as if they were rules of writing also. Of course they are. Writing and reading are reciprocal, as are teaching and being taught. If authors and teachers did not organize their communications, if they failed to unify them and order their parts, there would be no point in directing readers or listeners to search for the unity and uncover the structure of the whole.

Nevertheless, although the rules are reciprocal, they are not followed in the same way. The reader tries to uncover the skeleton that the book conceals. The author starts with the skeleton and tries to cover it up. His aim is to conceal the skeleton artistically or, in other words, to put flesh on the bare bones. If he is a good writer, he does not bury a puny skeleton under a mass of fat; on the other hand, neither should the flesh be too thin, so that the bones show through. If the flesh is thick enough, and if flabbiness is avoided, the joints will be detectible and the motion of the parts will reveal the articulation.

Why is this so? Why should not an expository book, one that attempts to present a body of knowledge in an ordered way, be merely an outline of the subject? The reason is not only that most readers cannot read outlines, and that such a book would be repellent to a self-respecting reader who thought that if he could do his job, the author ought to do his.

There is more to it than that. The flesh of a book is as much a part of it as the skeleton. This is as true of books as it is of animals and human beings. The flesh-the outline spelled out, "read out," as we sometimes say-adds an essential dimension.

It adds life, in the case of the animal. Just so, actually writing the book from an outline, no matter how detailed, gives the work a kind of life that it would not otherwise have had.

We can summarize all of this by recalling the old-fashioned maxim that a piece of writing should have unity, clarity, and coherence. That is, indeed, a basic maxim of good writing. The two rules we have been discussing in this chapter relate to writing that follows that maxim. If the writing has unity, we must find it. If the writing has clarity and coherence, we must appreciate it by finding the distinction and the order of the parts. What is clear is so by the distinctness of its outlines.

What is coherent hangs together in an orderly disposition of parts.

These two rules, therefore, can be used to distinguish well made books from badly made ones. If, after you have attained sufficient skill, no amount of effort on your part results in your apprehension of the unity of a book, and if you are also not able to discern its parts and their relation to one another, then very likely the book is a bad one, whatever its reputation. You should not be too quick to make this judgment; perhaps the fault is in you instead of the book. However, neither should you fail ever to make it and always assume that the fault is in you. In fact, whatever your own failings as a reader, the fault is usually in the book, for most books-the very great majority -are badly made books in the sense that their authors did not write them according to these rules.

These two rules can also, we might add, be used in reading any substantial part of an expository book, as well as the whole. If the part chosen is itself a relatively independent, complex unity, its unity and complexity must be discerned for it to be well read. Here there is a significant difference between books conveying knowledge and poetical works, plays, and novels. The parts of the former can be much more autonomous than the parts of the latter. The person who says of a novel that he has "read enough to get the idea" does not know what he is talking about. He cannot be correct, for if the novel is any good at all, the idea is in the whole and cannot be found short of reading the whole. But you can get the idea of Aristotle's Ethics or Darwin's Origin of Species by reading some parts carefully, although you would not, in that case, be able to observe Rule 3.

Discovering the Author's Intentions

There is one more rule of reading that we want to discuss in this chapter. It can be stated briefly. It needs little explanation and no illustration. It really repeats in another form what you have already done if you have applied the second and third rules. But it is a useful repetition because it throws the whole and its parts into another light.

This fourth rule can be stated thus :

RULE 4. FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR'S PROBLEMS WERE. The author of a book starts with a question or a set of questions. The book ostensibly contains the answer or answers.

The writer may or may not tell you what the questions were as well as give you the answers that are the fruits of his work. Whether he does or does not, and especially if he does not, it is your task as a reader to formulate the questions as precisely as you can. You should be able to state the main question that the book tries to answer, and you should be able to state the subordinate questions if the main question is complex and has many parts. You should not only have a fairly adequate grasp of all the questions involved but should also be able to put the questions in an intelligible order. Which are primary and which secondary? Which questions must be answered first, if others are to be answered later?

You can see how this rule duplicates, in a sense, work you have already done in stating the unity and finding its parts. It may, however, actually help you to do that work. In other words, following the fourth rule is a useful procedure in conjunction with obeying the other two.

And since the rule is a little more unfamiliar than the other two, it may be even more helpful to you in tackling a difficult book. We want to emphasize, however, that we do not mean for you to fall into what is called by critics the intentional fallacy. That is the fallacy of thinking you can discover what was in an author's mind from the book he has written. This applies particularly to literary works; it is a grave error, for example, to try to psychoanalyze Shakespeare from the evidence of Hamlet.

Nevertheless, even with a poetical work, it is often extremely helpful to try to say what the author was trying to do. In the case of expository works, the rule has obvious merit. And yet most readers, no matter how skilled in other respects, very often fail to observe it. As a result, their conception of a book's main point or theme may be extremely deficient, and of course their outline. of its structure will be chaotic. They will fail to see the unity of a book because they do not see why it has the unity it has; and their apprehension of the book's skeletal structure will lack comprehension of the end that it serves.

If you know the kinds of questions anyone can ask about anything, you will become adept in detecting an author's problems. They can be formulated briefly: Does something exist? What kind of thing is it? What caused it to exist, or under what conditions can it exist, or why does it exist? What purpose does it serve? What are the consequences of its existence? What are its characteristic properties, its typical traits? What are its relations to other things of a similar sort, or of a different sort?