How To Get The Most Out of A Book - Analytical Reading 101

hello and welcome to a calm evening in my living room so today we're going to talk about we're going to give you some really practical really quick tips on how to read a book analytically and how to read a book is actually a brilliant book by mortality adler which i'll link you to in the description down below and this is actually going to be a companion video for my medium article on how to read a book how to get the most out of a book so without further ado let's get straight into it tip number one is that once you've purchased a book once you have sort of got your hands on a good read you want to make this book your own so in a sense if you've purchased this book this book is completely yours and i don't care what other people say and people tend to freak out a lot when they see me marking all over my book here so this is actually a book called milbranch it's actually a seminar by the philosopher ellen badu so this is a really great read for me so far and my book is currently destroyed i've basically demolished this book with plastic flags and notes all over these pages for those of you who are kind of like a little bit hesitant on you know putting markings in the margins of your book i want you to think of this entire marking process as sort of an exchange with the author because when you've purchased a book when you decide to read this book the idea that you're trying to get out of this book it cannot happen without like a conversational exchange and if you're a student of philosophy you would have realized that the history of philosophy is it's just a whole bunch of conversations between philosophers and if you're reading a non-fiction fiction book of your choice then you're basically engaging in a conversation with the author so in a sense when you're engaging in that sort of exchange you want some sort of that transcript of that exchange so this step number one marking up the book is going to serve as a transcript for you to converse with the author so that's the right way to view it if you want to really mark up a book for example here this page is absolutely demolished with my personal notes and that's going to bring us to the second point which is the process called sign posting so sign posting is in a sense why i have so many crazy plastic flags sticking out of these books and that's not the only one so for the research for my previous video um foucault's second volume of the history of sexuality is also tabbed out of its mind you don't just want to tab every single little thing so hear me out if a non-fiction book is structured in a very logical sequence if it's structured in a way that's logical then the author is trying to present to you arguments in the form of propositions so propositions tend to fall under arguments and your job as a reader is to pick out these propositions to pick out what the chapter is arguing or what the chapter is trying to get at and the first step to do this is to do a broad inspectional reading of the chapter so once you have got your hands on the chapter you want to go through a chapter really quickly and look out for the structure of the chapter so where are the paragraph breaks are there lists are there bold headings are there sub-paragraphs and you want to get a general sense of this entire structure of the chapter before you dive in and find propositions and arguments once you've done a really broad sign posting so to speak once you've done a broad inspectional reading then re-read the chapter again and use plastic flags and use a pencil and to underline anything that stood out to you and these are mainly arguments and points that you want to grab onto as the central structure of your reading so for example uh one chapter here after inspectionally going through this chapter i've realized that this entire chapter actually fell under three main arguments so i numbered these arguments in a sense in one two three so these are going to serve as my anchor to sort of read the text to sort of understand what a chapter is all about and then once you've signed posted that once you've tabbed these signposts once you've anchored yourself to these very central points of your reading because what's going to happen is that the chapter could be filled with a lot of fillers and the job of these signposts is to sort of group those fillers under these three main ideas so you don't get lost in a chapter and after you've signed posted the entire chapter and after you've read through this entire chapter with your signposts with your little plastic flags i want you to flip open to the very back of the book usually there are some empty pages at the back of the book so i want you to attempt to summarize the chapter with your little sign posts these are really brief notes i encourage you to write these summaries in your own notes and don't quote the author directly because through forcing yourself to summarize the chapter in your own words you're in a sense processing the chapter more analytically so grab onto the sign posts that you've tabbed using plastic flags and then re-read these sign posts and attempt to sort of conjure up a summary at the very end of the book these could look very elaborate this could look very messy and i even have diagrams here just to help me comprehend a chapter and once you've done that entire summary there's a pretty good chance that you've understood the chapter very very lucidly now the arguments in the chapter are going to stand out to you more prominently and that's how you know you've you know you've basically digested a chapter really competently and after you've done your summary one last step which is called the step of archiving you need a system because you're not going to carry this around with you all the time it gets pretty cumbersome it gets pretty annoying to have like five or six books in your bag because my bag is currently falling apart because carry around so many books you want a little system for you analog or on your computer i personally use notion and my personal notebooks to keep track of all these summary notes and sign posts for my readings so you can devise your own system and make sure it's practical make sure you don't run out of energy doing it make sure it's not a big time investment it should be something that's quickly jotted down in sort of like a system that you can trust so you can refer back to it all the time actually for a lot of the research that i do for my longer form video essays this is the process that i use so i can harvest quotes and then citations and then page numbers from this archive that i have on notion and the archiving system um for my personal notebooks so this is all around a very good very good system for you to use keep in mind that this is kind of like a companion video to the medium post on how to get the most out of a book and expect more of these little videos to pop up to give you very quick practical tips recorded in my living room on reading because um outside of youtube i'm actually heading to postgrad next year so the academic pressure it is on so to survive that sort of pressure i need to gear myself up with all these reading skills so it wouldn't hurt for me to share some of this with you guys in the future and i already wanted to hear a really short one today hope you guys have enjoyed it and i will see you in the next video goodbye and good night

Channel: Robin Waldun

Views: 563,514

Keywords: how to read philosophy, how to read philosophy books, how to read philosophy texts, how to read a book effectively, how to read a book fast, how to read a book a day, how to read more, how to read more books, how to read more in less time, how to read more effectively, how to remember what, how to remember what you read, how to remember what you studied, study tips and tricks, study tips for exam, study tips for college students, rc waldun commonplace book

Id: Ls2ynrMv10A

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2022