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Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Lincoln Van Doren. (1972). How to read a book. Simon & Schuster, Inc.

My thoughts open questions

Can the rules described here be reversed to produce the critical rules of writing? Do these rules generalize to other forms of educational materials like youtube videos? How does one determine which books are worth reading in such detail? How do the ideas here help frame the Learning process in Design your own self-study course situations? Are there any applications for Open Educational Resources? Is syntopical reading still important when in a university setting where professors can be queried? Most of my classes have a core textbook supplemented by journal articles and other brief disconnected readings; should this be rethought to instead have multiple core textbooks? Do the journal articles fill in some of the gaps for syntopical reading if there's only one core textbook? There are discussions about the roles of other books for understanding this one (I'm currently in chapter 12) in the sense of multiple absent teachers; what role might other students play, ie is there value in going through the struggle alone?

What about encoding? This book is primarily focused on reading to increase understanding rather than reading for information, but books often contain information in addition to exposition. Is there a way to improve encoding and retention of the information while also getting the understanding the book has to offer? Are these competing goals? Is information acquisition limited to the inspectional reading level?

How do we choose a book to read? For syntopical reading, how do we choose multiple books? What are our selection criteria? Do they overlap with Collection development process thoughts?

Since I use ebooks exclusively at this point, how can I adapt the notetaking strategy they outline for digital books? Doing annotations within calibre might be doable, but hard on a kindle. Writing notes here, like I did for this book, is durable and convenient ish, I can cross-link things and so on, but is pretty far removed from the source material itself. And if I split this into atomic notes it'll get even further.

This could be applied to a range of documents (Buckland, M. K. (1997). What Is a "Document"? Journal of the American Society for Information Science (1986-1998), 48(9), 804-809.) not just books, but only documents that are non-interactive and have the capacity to improve one's understanding through their analysis. Journal articles are an obvious example.

The basics of reading

Chapter 1 The Activity and Art of Reading

Reading is an active endeavor, but some is more active than other. You can read to gain additional facts at your same level of understanding, or you can read to gain additional understanding. Reading to increase understanding requires that 1, the work presents an understanding that is "superior" to ones current understanding, and 2, that the reader can struggle with the work in such a way as to gain some amount of that understanding gap for themself. There are other ways to gain understanding than this, but if you want to read well, this is how. That struggle to understand, to increase one's understanding, is a process made of up skills that can be studied and practiced and improved and applied.

Does this struggle happen in the Zone of Learning? What are the skills? How does one practice them? How does one know/measure an increase in understanding? There's an asterisk, but they assert the struggle must be done directly with the book, no outside assistance like a teacher or cliff notes?

Public education taught people to read. Public libraries gave them material to read. Thus we have a literate population. The public library is sometimes called the poor man's university. Learning, increasing one's understanding, is a process of discovery. Doing so with the aid of a teacher is aided discovery; the teacher can't do the learning for the student. But a living teacher can answer a question posed by the student, whereas a book cannot. So on the one hand, you could go out and observe the natural world and try to derive physics from your observations. On the other, you could ask a physics professor. A book has the non-interactivity of the natural world but definitely provides instruction so you're not starting from scratch. One can learn to make the most of the book as a "teacher".

But if you're going to do that, what is the library? A collection of non-interactive professors? And what then is the role of the librarian? Do librarians prioritize information, or prioritize works that will allow people to increase their understanding? How do we select the best books for the latter when that's the goal? Is the librarian then a an interactive meta-non-interactive professor?

Chapter 2: Levels of reading

There are four levels of reading.

  1. Level one is just identifying the words on the page important when reading foreign language texts.
  2. The second level is inspectional, what can you learn from this book in a fixed amount of time, what is this book about, how is it structured?
  3. Level 3 is analytical reading, digging deep into the text, getting as much understanding out of it as possible given unlimited time. If you don't do an inspection reading first, you end up doing both inspectional and analytical reading at the same time, which complicates things. How?
  4. Level four involves reading multiple books, with the goal of synergizing the understanding from all of them to create understanding more than the sum of its parts.

Chapter 3: Elementary reading

Lots of different methods employed. Letters, combinations of letters, whole words or sentences, invented "learning" alphabets, phonics, some based on linguistics and some based on instructional program.

Inspectional Reading

Chapter 4: Inspectional reading

Inspection part 1: overview. Review the book's title, subtitle, table of contents, index terms with the most pages. Then read the introduction and conclusion, limiting to sentences and paragraphs. Read these fast enough to get the gist of it, with a fixed time limit. Questions to answer in this part: What kind of book is this? What is the main idea? How is it structured?

Inspection part 2: superficial read. Again, this should be fast. Read the book from the beginning, start to finish. Don't get stuck or stop to think hard. The main goal is to keep going all the way through the book. Even if you only understand half of it, that's still half! That's a lot! And it's the half you can build on when you come back to read more thoroughly if you decide to. Questions to answer in this part: What are the main themes and reasoning points to support the book's main idea? Does this book deserve to be read in more depth?

Speed reading only makes sense in the context of fixing basic reading errors (like eye movement) and in learning to vary the speed at which you read to fit the material you're in. Fast for rhetoric, slow for complex. Reading everything fast doesn't get you what you need.

The superficial read is asserted to be the most important rule of inspectional reading.

Chapter 5: Being a demanding reader

If you ask a question of the book, you have to answer it yourself.

You can't read effectively while you're asleep. To stay engaged, you have to ask questions of the book and then find the answers. While this is a continual process as the content of the book unfolds, there are four you should be in the habit of asking all the time.

  1. What's this book about?
  2. What are the major themes and evidence used to make the main point? What is being said in detail, and how?
  3. Is the stuff the book says true?
  4. So what?

Inspectional reading is primarily concerned with the first two questions. As you pursue answers, the authors suggest taking notes in the book itself, and lay out a schema for doing so. The latter two questions are explored more in analytical and syntopical reading, though you can get some answers to that during an inspectional superficial read.

As you ask questions and look for their answers, trying to hold everything in your head becomes a barrier to comprehension. Taking notes is how you overcome that problem. Note the questions and their answers as you go. They describe 3 types of notes:

The above is an example of a structural note!

In order to be a proficient high-level reader, one must utilize all of these skills and processes in tandem. That can be quite challenging. Like riding a bike, it makes sense to break it down into the basics skills, as the authors are doing here. Understand each, practice each, and then practice combining them into the whole. Eventually this process should be habitual and instinctive.

Is that possible though? We're not talking about riding a bicycle. Actively engaging with the material seems like it would require focused specific thought, and would not lend itself to instinctive execution.

Analytical reading

Chapter 6: Pigeonholing a Book

Analytical reading stage 1. Identify the type and kind of book. What genre heading would it fall under in a library or bookstore? What kind of teaching is it attempting to provide (history, science, philosophy)? Note these often aren't the same thing. This is important because the type and kind of book tell you how it's taught, and thus you can apply the appropriate kind of learning. Practical vs theoretical. Note that you have to have some categories already in mind before you can slot this book into one.

Rule 1 of analytical reading: You must know what kind of book you are reading, and you should know this as early in the process as possible, preferably before you begin to read. (that's why you do an inspectional read first).

Chapter 7: X-raying a book

Analytical reading stage 1 still.

Rule 2: State the unity of a book (it's main thesis) in a single sentence, or at most a few sentences. It should be concrete and concise. If you need a lot of words to explain it, you probably haven't understood the main point with sufficient clarity. Many authors give you the central idea in the introduction.

Rule 3: Express the central ideas or points in the book, in a logical order in relation to each other, and how they connect with the main thesis of the book. (this is recursive/fractal, each central idea can be broken down the same way, diminishing returns). Don't just rely on the author's table of contents; you need to assert your own understanding of the interrelation of points by drafting your own outline.

Both of these generally happen at the same time.

Rule 4: Identify the question(s) the author was intended to answer by writing the book.

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? How does it behave? These are all theoretical questions. What ends should be sought? What means should be chosen to a given end? What things must one do to gain a certain objective, and in what order? Under these conditions, what is the right thing to do, or the better rather than the worse? Under what conditions would it be better to do this rather than that? These are all practical questions.

Understanding why the author wrote it, understanding the intended end the book serves, is critical to understanding the unity. Thus, rule 4 helps address rule 2, as does rule 3.

Chapter 8: Coming to terms with an author

Analytical reading stage 2. Terms and words are not a one-to-one correlation. Terms are very specific meanings that the author tries to convey with words. "Reading" is a good example from this book. Often these are the words that are difficult to understand the precise intended meaning of, or words the author explicitly defines.

Rule 5: Find the important words and through them come to terms with the author. Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words.

Chapter 9: Determining and author's message

Analytical reading stage 2 still. Just as words and terms do not have a one-to-one relationship, sentences and propositions do not, and paragraphs and arguments do not. A proposition is an assertion, a point made, a truth claimed or a falsehood disclaimed. Not a question.

Rule 6: Mark the most important sentences in a book and discover the propositions they contain. Grasp the author's leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences.

Rule 7: Locate or construct the basic arguments in the book by finding them in the "connections of sentences" (not paragraphs). Know the authors arguments by finding them in or constructing them out of sequences of sentences.

Finding the critical sentences is important. They are comprised of terms, so if you know the terms you can spot the sentences, and vice versa. Focus on the statements that puzzle you, not the ones that interest you. It's fine to be interested in the author's point of view in the world in which they wrote, but the goal is to understand the point the author is making. Feeling confused, struggling to understand something, is the best indicator that this is an opportunity to increase understanding. Authors may try to help identify these sentences, eg in this book they're in all caps to stand out and are labeled "Rule X".

But once we discover the sentences, how do we grasp their propositions, the other half of rule 6? Identify the terms that comprise them, break the sentence down into its individual claims, diagram it like in middle school.

How do we connect the identified sentences so that they form the main arguments of the book, for rule 7? All of the important sentences get underlined and numbered with the argument they relate to, so that you can find all of the sentences for argument X and list them out together. Sometimes an argument spans multiple paragraphs, other times it may only be part of one paragraph. Importantly, sometimes part of a paragraph, or even a whole paragraph, doesn't actually have any of these important sentences. They may just be rhetoric (trying to get you to believe something) or evidence in support of an argument (but not the argument itself). And some are just fluff. Varying your reading speed is important so you can get through fluff without wasting time, but be discerning; don't miss important bits hidden in the fluff.

You can use the Feynman technique to verify your understanding of a complicated sentence. If you can only use the author's words, rather than stating it your own way, you don't understand it. Being able to identify the same thought expressed using different words is important in syntopical reading, since authors in the same field may describe the same concept using different words, or use very similar words to describe different things. Concrete examples of something the proposition applies to can also work.

My question: if I've misunderstood, and state in my own words something different in meaning than the author, what good is this? I will have understood something but I cannot be sure it's the author's thought.

Rule 8: Identify the answers/solutions the author has found. Determine which of his problems the author has solved and which he has not, and to the latter decide which the author knew he had failed to solve.

Wrapping up stage 2 of analytical reading, this is the compliment to rule 4 that has us identify the questions the author is asking. Not all of the questions may have been answered. Answering some may have raised others. Identify not only which ones the author has answered and raised, but which they haven't, and whether they know they haven't.

This concludes the second stage of analytical reading. The second stage of analytical reading allows us to answer the second question: what is being said in detail, and how? Stages 1 and 2 can be completed mostly in parallel.

Chapter 10: Criticizing a book fairly

At this point, we have a back-to-front top-to-bottom understanding of the book. We know the author's main thesis, all of the supporting arguments and their supporting arguments, the important terms, and how everything fits together. It's time to start phase 3 of analytical reading: evaluation.

While you were working to understand the book, in stages 1 and 2 of analytical reading, you were the student subservient to the teacher. But once you can honestly say that you understand the book, can state its arguments in your own words, you are now approximately on equal standing with its author. As their peer, and having done the work of understanding what they were trying to say, it is now your responsibility and obligation as the reader to critically evaluate it. (Is this ethical assertion valid?) The authors of this book assert that in some cases one must have the broader context of other books to fully understand the points an author is making (eg gotta read Capital before the Communist Manifesto to fully understand either); I can agree that being cautious with criticism for a particular chapter may be warranted, but I'm not convinced about extending that to other books. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Rule 9: You must be able to say with reasonable certainty "I understand" before you can say one of the following things: "I agree," or "I disagree," or "I reserve judgment".

It's important not to start the judgement process before you understand everything. If you begin too soon, you may not have all the info you need to have a good judgement of it. Don't be too quick to judge. The less you understand it, the more is likely that you haven't understood the arguments yet rather than the arguments themselves being at fault.

Rule 10: When you disagree, do so reasonably, and not disputatiously or contentiously.

Criticism in this context doesn't mean to be dismissive or argumentative. It means to be critical in one's assessment. Criticism can be disagreement, but it can also be agreement or reserving judgement. Don't argue for argument's sake, don't argue to win. Don't argue to tear down the author's arguments without justification. Be careful how you word criticism, keep in mind that you may be wrong, and don't engage in criticism when you know you're wrong. The goal of criticism is to make up your own mind, sometimes to challenge the author, in pursuit of truth rather than to "win" and satisfy your ego. You should also enter into such a discussion under the assumption that either your mind or the authors can be changed. Discussion should not be hopeless.

Rule 11: Respect the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion, by giving reasons for any critical judgment you make. (Try to persuade the author)

Chapter 11: Agreeing or disagreeing with the author

If you don't understand a book, even after giving it a good try, that is a valid criticism of the work. But you do have to support that criticism by showing how terms are misused, how arguments don't logically follow, evidence that the book cannot be understood. If you have understood, and if you agree with everything, then your work is done. But there is 65% of a book left, so all of the disagree and reserve judgment cases are about to get explored. It is necessary to acknowledge the emotions you bring to a dispute or those that arise in the course of it. You must make your own assumptions explicit, good controversy should not be a quarrel about assumptions. And you should attempt impartiality, even if it is not actually possible. You should try to take the author's point of view and give them a sympathetic reading.

Rule 12: You must demonstrate how the author is uninformed (lacks information) Rule 13: You must demonstrate how the author is misinformed (asserts things that are false) Rule 14: You must demonstrate logical fallacies (either non-sequitur or incompatibility) Rule 15: You must identify where the analysis is incomplete (questions the author raised but didn't answer, conclusions they could have drawn but didn't)

Rules 12-14 would be reasons to say the book is false. 15 is a reason to reserve judgement.

This finally leaves us with the tools to answer the remaining two questions from chapter 5, "is what the book says true" and "so what?" These are all of the rules for analytical reading.

There are a lot of references in this book to the parallels between teaching and learning, writing and reading. These are all rules for analytical reading. What would the equivalent rules for writing be?

Chapter 12: Aids to reading

If you arrive at the end of the analytical reading process and find that you still don't understand, then you might consider extrinsic AIDS in understanding. Relevant experience, other books, commentaries and abstracts, and reference books. This should only be attempted after you've exhausted the opportunities to learn from the book itself, and you still see some hope of increasing your understanding.

Relevant experience can be broken into two types, common and special. Philosophy and fiction both rely on the common experiences of people in order to judge it critically. Does this feel true to the experience of common people? Sciences often rely on special, laboratory experiments that have to be explained and data that has to be analyzed. History often requires both, the narrative aspect for common, but a study of ancient ruins or interviews with faraway people or reviewing very old documents is a special sort of thing. Understanding be tested as previously described, see if you can come up with a concrete example of the point of the author is making.

Without going into some topical reading, using the other books helps place this book in the context of a larger discussion between authors. If you were going to read a "great book" (famous, foundational) it may help to read the materials published before that one that influenced the author. For example, before reading the Federalist papers, you might want to read the articles of Confederation and the constitution. Reading things in chronological order provides the conversational context leading up to the booking question.

Commentaries are useful to go to for additional insight after you have done the work of understanding a book, but should not be consulted beforehand. They are often wrong, can create prejudice, and relying on them can make you a worse reader. Abstracts are useful in two cases, one is after you have read the book to jog your memory of what it is about, though in that case hopefully you already wrote your own. The other is to determine whether a book is worth reading in pursuit of whatever your current interest is.

For reference books, you have to know what you want to know, know what kind of reference book it's in, how to find it in that reference book, and reference books only contain things that are considered knowable. Dictionaries: don't read the book in one hand and the dictionary in the other; Words as Signs cf Buckland 1997, Dufrenne 1973, Barthes 1988, semiotics. Encyclopedias:

Its presentation of material in the form of separate articles would be alphabetical, but it would also contain some kind of topical key or outline---essentially, a table of contents. (A table of contents is a topical arrangement of a book, as opposed to an index, which is an alphabetical arrangement.) As far as we know, there is no such encyclopedia on the market today, but it would be worth the effort to try to make one.

Guess what, we did better than that! Or worse. Searchability is an enormous gain to finding individual items, but discoverability has in some ways suffered (in that in some ways it's too hard, and in others it's way too easy (wikipedia rabbit holes)). Encyclopedias are great for immediately settling matters of fact (not opinion). Arguing over facts is stupid; we should argue about their implications. The contents of encyclopedias are propositions, just like the contents of dictionaries are terms. Propositions are claims, and may not be true; and different encyclopedias can certainly disagree about them. Facts are only useful within context that give them meaning.

Wow this book is a product of its time. Very Western-centric and explicitly and rudely dismissive of non-Western ideals. I wonder where that manifests in this work more subtly than here, that I may have overlooked? Certainly there's a lot of reference to Greek and Roman philosophers, and to Kant and Adam Smith and Newton and so on. I find those examples relatable because I am familiar with them, while Eastern or Indigenous thought leaders and philosophies etc I am certainly not. But how would the arguments in this book change if they relied on those other examples?

Encyclopedia are limited tools for learning. They treat each of their subjects shallowly by necessity, they don't (shouldn't?) contain the persuasive factors of expository writing, and (these authors assert) the deepening of understanding requires both reason and imagination (encyclopedia containing only the former). Thus, dictionaries and encyclopedia are both aids to reading, and perhaps informational, but poor primary sources for a deepening of understanding.

Advice/instructions for specific types of books

Chapter 13: Practical books

If you're dealing with a practical work, it can be broken into two types: one is a list of rules, the other are listed principles with the rules implied. In the latter case, devising the rules is important to understanding it. Practical works are always about how good or bad something can be done. If it is not something that we want to do, then no matter how sound the list of rules may be for achieving that end, we will ultimately disagree with it. Thus the end goal of the reader is a component to the critical evaluation of a practical work.

Every practical book involves encouragement to action, appeals to the heart as well as the mind. Being aware of the objective and means and reading analytically allows one to detect the propaganda.

Question 3 is recast as do you agree that the end goal is in alignment with you and that the means to achieve them are right according to you. For question four, if you agree on the ends and the means, you are obligated to act as the author has described. If you don't, then you either don't agree with the goal, or you don't agree with the means of achieving it.

Chapter 14: How to read imaginative literature

Don't guard against the emotional experience, don't look for arguments and prepositions, don't criticize by the standards of truth and consistency.

It's unity is in its plot, the arguments are the developments of the characters through the story, judge it by its beauty, be able to state why it moved you, and point to the things in the work that caused it, rather than framing it about yourself.

Chapter 15: Suggestions for reading stories, please, and poems

There isn't really a fourth question for imaginative work. The end result of question 3 is all you need. The work stands on its own and doesn't necessarily imply any action must be taken towards one's views or the world around them.

There were specific notes for big poems and little poems and plays, the only thing that stuck out to me was try reading it aloud. Mostly skimmed this section.

When reading history, if practically possible read more than one account. Read history not just to learn what happened but to learn the patterns of people, to find the repeating patterns in social behavior that can apply now and in the future too. Try to identify the scope of what the author intends to address, time/area/topic/point of view and so on.

Biographies are types of histories. They tried to show us the story of a life, and we all have lives to lead, so hopefully we can learn something. History shows us what is possible, and therefore instructs us on what we ourselves can do, or can avoid.

The news is just history that is very recent. As with anything historical, be aware of the author, but for new be especially aware of who is paying them.

For digests and summaries, the question of motivations of the author and who pays them becomes even more critical. This kind of writing is typically very dense, with all the superfluous material removed, so reading these can be very difficult.

Chapter 17: How to read science and mathematics

Old books on this topic targeted the lay person, rather than people with presupposed specialized knowledge. Since so much modern science and math stuff is written for people specialized in those fields, there are layperson versions that try to make that more approachable. HTRAB is going to talk about reading the great works from before this problem came about, and these layperson versions that are modern versions. Don't be scared of math. Try to work through some of the proofs if that's the aim of the text. For science, skip the math if it doesn't matter to your understanding, just understand what the experiment was and the results were. These books try to explain how the world generally is, rather than a specific place/time. Math is a very precise language.

Chapter 18: How to read philosophy

Questions about existence, does everything exist and does everything change. Practical questions, how should a person live, how should we structure a just society? Existential vs practical. None of this requires specialized knowledge or experiments; it's entirely about things in common human experience and just... thinking really hard.

Beware, sometimes philosophers try to answer a question that better belongs to the realm of science or vice versa. It isn't always known at the time of writing which is the case.

Dialog (Plato, exposition through conversation), treatise (Aristotle, straightforward exposition via direct explanation).

Chapter 19: How to read social science

It is very difficult to find terms because everything is shifting so much, even the author may not know terms. It's often necessary to read more than one work on a particular subject of interest, and so this chapter serves as an introduction to the need for the topical reading.

The ultimate goals of reading

If your goal is to learn everything you can from a single book, use analytical reading. If your goal is to examine a topic from the perspective of more than one author, possibly a topic the authors don't address directly, use syntopical reading.

Chapter 20: Syntopical reading (level 4)

Analytical reading is about learning everything you can from a single book. Syntopical reading is about tackling a subject that the author(s) isn't directly addressing. Rather than read a single book and making yourself student to the author's teacher, we instead create our own structure and build off the contents of multiple books by various authors. In so doing, we can explore a topic without being confined to the viewpoint of a single teacher.

So if you're not reading a single book, how do you know which books to include? First, you generate a reading list by means of bibliographies, card catalogs, recommendations from subject matter experts, and so on. Then, you give every single one on the list an inspectional reading. Goal is to determine two things:

The latter is important, because we often don't know how to phrase our information need (Taylor 1968). Doing the inspectional readings will help us refine it, and decide which books make it to the next phase. Few books will make this cut. This step is about prioritization.

The goal of syntopical reading is not to learn everything possible from the books that make the cut, so we don't dive into the full analytical reading process for all of them. Instead, you do a second inspectional reading of the books that made the cut. It has to be separate because otherwise you won't have a clear definition of the subject of interest. During the second inspectional reading, identify the relevant passages from the books that you have inspected.

Next, define your own terms and translate from each author into them. Don't adopt the terminology of any one author because that can interfere with your ability to hear the others clearly. Plus none of them may have terms that fit your particular problem so it may be necessary to invent them.

Next, we generate a list of questions about our subject of interest that we can ask each book. Pick questions the books (at least most of them) can answer. Obviously the questions will depend on the subject, but might proceed: some about the existence or character of the subject we're interested in, how it is known or how it manifests, and what are the consequences of the answers to the previous two. Hopefully most of the authors can answer most of the questions. If not explicitly, they may include enough related information to infer an answer, but proceed there with caution. For each question, authors will answer differently or not at all, and sorting that mess out to arrive at our answers is the goal.

Completing that process gives us the answers to the first two questions: what is the topic of our interest and how to these texts shed light upon it?

Next, we go through each question, noting the answers provided (or inferred) from each book. It's important to include citations and quotes here to avoid putting words into the author's mouths as much as possible. As you collect the answers, some may disagree with each other. In this case, group together answers from agreeing books into "sides" of the Issue. Framing an issue well is key here; an issue should show where authors disagree in their views and not in their conception of the question. Group related Issues into Controversies.

Finally, organizing it clearly by stating agreements and issues precisely, showing how they relate and the different camps the authors fall into. This is the equivalent of an outline from analytical reading: it helps us see the whole of the discussion by assembling its parts and showing their relationships. It should be expressed in a way where the analysis points are defended by using the author's own words when possible combined with the logic of the organization and presentation.

Of course, agreement isn't equivalent to true. Everyone thought the earth was flat. If there's disagreement it's likely that each side contains some amount of truth. But it's also possible all sides are false, or exactly one side is true and not the rest.

The answer to "is it true" and "what of it" is this analysis of the discussion, more or less. HTRAB authors assert that such an "objective" analysis of the discussion between authors is the end goal of syntopical reading. Because the questions being worked through via syntopical reading are complex, there often isn't a simple answer at the end for "this is the right thing to believe or do." If you come to your own conclusions after examining the analysis, you risk becoming just another voice in that discussion. But what's wrong with that?

It seems to me that if one wanted to write their own opinion of the topic under consideration, doing a syntopical analysis would be a heck of a way to do the literature review. One could from there proceed to exposit new thoughts or considerations or conclusions. And then you've written your own book.

Is my goal to understand the discussion the authors are having amongst themselves, or to come to a conclusion about the topic I was interested in? Perhaps not a conclusion, just an understanding of what others have written about it. I can't find my conclusion in their words, I have to make it myself.

To summarize:

Before you start syntopical reading:

  1. Create the bibliography
  2. Inspect all of the books to us to obtain which are germane to your subject and acquire a clearer idea of the subject. These two May interact.

To conduct the syntopical reading:

  1. Inspect the books already identified in order to find the most relevant passages.
  2. Create a neutral terminology that all of the authors could conceivably share.
  3. Devise the questions necessary for understanding the subject and that authors have mostly addressed
  4. Identify the issues and classify authors on one side or another. Be sure to include citations to support your classification.
  5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject relationships between issues should be clearly indicated and issues should be logically grouped.

Does the author come into play when evaluating works via inspection? If it's a post by a transphobic organization on the topic of gender affirming care for minors, surely the author's credentials matter?

How do I decide if I want to read something syntopical from multiple works or analytically from a single book?

Chapter 21: Reading and the growth of the mind

Read to keep your brain healthy.

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