This is the fourth and final post in a series on How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren.


Synoptical reading

This is the highest level of reading one can achieve and it is distinctly different from plain analytical reading. This highest level of reading is actually highly dependent on the Inspectional level.

Synoptical reading involves reading and comparing multiple works on one topic in order to reconstruct and order the conversation on that subject. To do this, they recommend looking at a couple bibliographies and collecting a hundred or so of the most relevant looking works. Then you use inspectional reading to analyze all of them and determine which works OR which parts of WORKS are relevant.

The key is that you want to determine whether this work has something important to say about your topic of interest. The authors outline five steps.

First, identify the relevant passages. For those who are not experts at this, they recommend that this step be separate from your initial inspectional readings of all the works you have accumulated. This is not to say that you should ignore passages that are clearly important your first time through, rather it is a caution to getting too bogged down or trying to answer the question before it is even fully formed in your mind.

Second, bring the authors to terms. Unlike Analytical reading, you need to take the ideas from the authors you read and synthesize them into your own language, rather than trying to fit your ideas into their language. If these authors wrote in different time periods, different places, or for different purposes, it is likely that they will refer to the same ideas using different terms and phrases. In synoptical reading your job is to translate those terms and ideas into one language so that you can build a coherent and intelligible conversation.

Third, get the questions clear. We need to create a number of neutral statements/propositions to which we can then apply the propositions of authors we read.

Fourth, defining the issues. This is simply abstracting from how various authors come down on neutral statements/questions. It is defining the broader themes and comparing authors and positions.

Fifth, analyzing the discussion. Here is where you weigh in on interpreting your findings and what is going on in the conversation. What are the salient points? Where are the biggest controversies? What are the newest developments? And where is the discussion heading going forward?

The authors have a few more remarks of how to do this and summarize their major points. The have a final chapter in the book about reading and the life of the mind which is quite lovely. In it they talk about the importance of reading good books that stretch you mentally. That is how you can best learn how to read better. They also talk about how some books can be understood well after one good reading, some after several readings, and the very best books, they say, will always bring something new to light for the active and disciplined reader. This is the case because that kind of reader is always growing in their faculty and knowledge which allows them to see and appreciate new intricacies and depths of meaning in the best books.

I hope you find this basic outline helpful. If you have questions, or even better comments, about ideas that are not in here, please leave a comment or email me. I'm looking forward to applying these ideas in my work and will probably blog about my attempts at a later date