Quotes About Comprehension

RULE 2. STATE THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE BOOK IN A SINGLE SENTENCE, OR AT MOST A FEW SENTENCES (A SHORT PARAGRAPH).

No es necesario saberlo todo acerca de un tema para comprenderlo; en muchas ocasiones, la existencia de demasiados hechos representa un obstáculo tan grande como la existencia de demasiados pocos. En la actualidad vivimos inundados de hechos, en detrimento de la comprensión.

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.

não importa se o que aprendeu é um fato sobre o livro ou um fato sobre o mundo: você aprendeu apenas informações, caso tenha exercitado apenas sua memória.

A primeira ignorância é a do analfabeto, isto é, do sujeito incapaz de ler. A segunda ignorância é a do sujeito que leu muitos livros, mas os leu de maneira incorreta.

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

Some writers have excellent "control"; they know exactly what they want to convey, and they convey it precisely and accurately

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.

your primary obligation is not to become competent in the subject matter but instead to understand the problem.

effectively? Yes and no. Up to the fifth and sixth grade, reading, on the whole, is effectively taught and well learned. To that level

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.

RULE 9. YOU MUST BE ABLE TO SAY, WITH REASONABLE CERTAINTY, "I UNDERSTAND," BEFORE YOU CAN SAY ANY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING THINGS: "I AGREE," OR "I DISAGREE," OR "I SUSPEND JUDGMENT.

2) You must grasp the unity of the whole work.

Francis Bacon once remarked that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it.

The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court. On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball.

3) You must not only reduce the whole to its simplest unity, but you must also discover how that whole is constructed out of all its parts.

The year after How to Read a Book was published, a parody of it appeared under the title How to Read Two Books; and Professor I. A. Richards wrote a serious treatise entitled How to Read a Page.

Note here the close relation between reading and listening. If we ignore the minor difference between these two ways of receiving communication, we can say that reading and listening are the same art - the art of being taught.

you can train yourself to follow as it moves more and more quickly across and down the page. You can do this yourself. Place your thumb and

Unless you read it quickly you will fail to see the unity of the story. Unless you read intensely you will fail to see the details.

In the first case, we may have obtained information, but we may not have increased our understanding. If the book is completely intelligible from cover to cover, then the author and the reader are like two minds with the same frame. The symbols on the page simply express the common understanding that the reader and writer shared before they met.

Suppose even that it is understood enough to know that it is not understood, which, unfortunately, does not always happen. It is known that the book means something more than what is understood, and therefore that it contains something that can increase our understanding.

Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.