Quotes About Interpretation

If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that not all of its words will be completely intelligible to you. 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 make no headway toward interpretation of the book. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand it.

Many readers fear that it would be disloyal to their commitment to stand apart and impersonally question what they are reading. Yet this is necessary whenever you read analytically.

From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.

a arte de ler é a técnica de apanhar qualquer tipo de comunicação.

Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do.

Every book, no matter how difficult, contains interstitial material that can be and should be read quickly; and every good book also contains matter that is difficult and should be read very slowly.

2. WHAT IS BEING SAID IN DETAIL, AND HOW?

Every book has a skeleton hidden between its covers. Your job as an analytical reader is to find it.

The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?

A book is a work of art. (Again

A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.

He is familiar with their ambiguity and he has grown accustomed to the variation in their meanings as they occur in this context or that.

Read biography as history and as the cause of history; take all autobiographies with a grain of salt; and never forget that you must not argue with a book until you fully understand what it is saying.

Thus the most important thing to know, when reading any report of current happenings, is who is writing the report. What is involved here is not so much an acquaintance with the reporter himself as with the kind of mind he has.

RULE 4. FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR'S PROBLEMS WERE.

Not simply by following an author's arguments, but only by meeting them as well, can the reader ultimately reach significant agreement or disagreement with his author.

RULE 5. FIND THE IMPORTANT WORDS AND THROUGH THEM COME TO TERMS WITH THE AUTHOR.

We must in such a way, when reading a story, that we let it act on us. We must allow it to move us, we must let it do whatever work it wants to do on us. We must somehow make ourselves open to it.

The book consists of language written by someone for the sake of communicating something to you. Your sucess in reading it is determined by the extent to which you recieve everything the writer intended to communicate.

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 that you do understand.

Reading a book is a kind of conversation. You may think it is not conversation at all, because the author does all the talking and you have nothing to say. If you think that, you do not realize your full obligation as a reader—and you are not grasping your opportunities.

State in your own words!" That suggests the best test we know for telling whether you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence. If, when you are asked to explain what the author means by a particular sentence, all you can do is repeat his very words, with some minor alterations in their order, you had better suspect that you do not know what he means. Ideally, you should be able to say the same thing in totally different words.

There are many paragraphs in any book that do not express an argument at all—perhaps not even part of one.

RULE 8. FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR'S SOLUTIONS ARE.