 So tell me if this sounds familiar. You sit down to do your readings. You read from the first sentence to the last. At the end of a paragraph, you stop, make a little dash in your notes, and try to summarize the main idea of the paragraph. After about an agent, after about a page and a half, after about a page and a half, you don't really, you know, you stop. You're tired. You don't really know what you've read. You don't know why you've read it. You don't know the point of the article or the reading. After about an hour or so, you're absolutely exhausted. You haven't really learned much of anything, and you wonder how this book is supposed to connect to the rest of the course. If this is the case, then you know how to read, but you don't know how to read. Let me clarify. You know how to read in one sense, in the sense that you can recognize letters and words and be able to voice them out, and then you might even be able to do some work in terms of understanding what the individual words mean, or the sentence as a whole. You'll be able to tell me what the sentence as a whole means. In that sense, sure, you know how to read, but there's another sense in which you read that you comprehend the work as a whole. You understand how all the parts are supposed to fit together to comprehend the point of the text. That's different than simply understanding individual words and even particular sentences. The reason why you have to work so much more when it comes to these pieces of classical literature, academic works, or even your textbooks is because there's so much more to do, they can't fit it all in the text. It would simply be too thick by that point. It's not like a narrative. A narrative tells you everything, within just the text, right? It tells you everything you need to know in that text, one event following another. Passive reading is when you read and you expect the text to have some kind of impact upon you. You know, simply by reading the words off the page, you understand everything that the author is trying to convey. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's really suitable for things like newspaper articles or popular fiction, comic books, or you know, those listicles that you see online. Active reading is when you're reading while trying to answer questions from the text. You come with questions prepared. Now, what you what you read in the text almost never explicitly answers those questions, right? It's never the point where the author says, I am entering this question here is my answer. You have to come to the text with these questions in mind and based upon what you've read, even though it's never explicitly stated, but based upon what you've read, based upon what you understand, you're able to answer those questions. Active reading is much more difficult than passive reading. You know, keep in mind, I'm not trying to belittle passive reading or listicles or comic books or popular fiction. I mean, these are good and these are good for you to read, but they demand much less of you than great works of literature or even, you know, maybe not so great textbooks. So I very quickly mentioned the terrible way to read. Let me just reiterate. All right, the terrible way to read is to read from the first to the last you stop at the, you know, at the end of a paragraph and make a little dash of your notes and try to summarize what you did. You don't ever go back and revise your notes. You don't compare your notes to what you've read and you certainly don't try to make changes to anything after it's all done. The better way to read, the good way to read, at least when you're first starting out, is skimming. Skimming is not speed reading. Speed reading is reading from the first sentence to the last very quickly. That's probably even a worse idea than the simplest reading from the first sentence to the last. Skimming is not speed reading. Skimming is selective reading. You dip in and out of the text trying to find the answers to these questions. And once you compile those answers, then you go back into detailed reading to understand everything as a whole. But skimming, skimming selective reading, which means you pick strategically certain parts of the text, not just randomly, right? Hey, that's fine, right here. No, right. You pick certain parts of the text to read first to answer those questions before you try to do any detailed reading, before you try to do any reading where you start from the first sentence to the last. And while you're skimming, right, you start with the title. The title actually is going to be able to tell you a lot, be able to tell you the area of discipline, the discourse, depending on how detailed the title is, it might even be able to tell you nearly what kind of question or field within that discipline the bulk or the article is dealing with. So for instance, if the title is something like The Life and Times of George Washington before the Civil War, it's like, okay, now you know it's history, now you know it's about George Washington, now you know it's before the Civil War, and probably going to give you some kind of clue as to why George Washington decided to lead the Revolutionary Forces to begin with, that'll give you some sort of insight. But that tells you something very narrow, right, within the broader field of history. It also distinguishes the text from, say, something in biology or, you know, European history or art criticism, right. There's lots that a title can tell you, and you start skimming there. After the title, skim the table of contents, selectively read the table of contents, right. The table of contents is very useful for identifying important parts of the text. Usually key concepts are in the table of contents, right. What are the major topics that the author is going to cover? Sometimes you're even going to find the steps, well, hopefully the author's done his or her job, right. You'll find the steps that the author takes to get to that conclusion, to reach that final point that they want you to believe. And that can happen with the chapter titles and the section titles of the text. So in the table of contents, yeah, quite often you can get a sense of what the whole book is about in terms of the important concepts, maybe not necessarily what the definitions are, but what the concept, by which concepts the author's going to be talking about, and the steps that the author takes to get to that conclusion. It's not going to be very common in our case, because the readings in this course are relatively short, we got mostly excerpts. But if you're reading a book overall, right, you would also look at the publisher's blurb, or even the prologue. This would give you some clues as to, at the very least, the intentions of the author, and hopefully some sort of third point perspective, you're going to deal with the publisher's blurb, somebody else talking about the work as a whole. One hopes that's what you get. In addition to the table of contents, giving you kind of an overall broad view of the text, the book that you're looking at, the introductory paragraph and the closing paragraph, or sections, can do this job as well. Usually it's a paragraph if it's a short article, and if it's a book, it's probably going to be the whole chapter there, the whole introductory chapter, the whole concluding chapter. Sometimes you just find an out and out summary of what the author thinks that the author is doing in those introductory paragraphs, and especially the concluding paragraphs, right? Let's say something like, in this piece, in this book I have talked about, I've tried to answer the question, I've argued for the point that these little phrases should tell you what the author should give you a good idea of what the author thinks that the author is doing. So you got the title, the table of contents, and the introductory paragraph and the concluding paragraph. Skimming those should give you a real good idea of the scaffolding of the book, this map, this direction that the book is taking. So I've said a couple of times now that when we're active reading, we're reading, trying to answer questions, questions that we've bring to the text beforehand. Well, one of those questions is the purpose. A purpose, at least what I call the purpose, right? I like that, you know, it's the reason why the author is writing to begin with. And I like to think of the purpose, especially because, maybe because I do a philosophy in particular, nonfiction in general, the reason, the purpose, I like to think of the purpose as the question that the author is trying to answer. What's the point of the whole endeavor to begin with? Trying to answer this question. They're trying to get you to ask that question, and they're trying to get you to believe a particular answer. The conclusion is what the philosopher believes answers that question. And I keep saying philosophy again, because that's the one I'm dealing with. But it's true, I think of any nonfiction as well. There's a question that the author's trying to get you to ask, and there's an answer that they want you to believe. So the purpose is the question. The conclusion is what that author believes answers that question. So that's the purpose and the conclusion. The purpose is the question the philosopher is trying to answer. The conclusion is what the philosopher believes answers that question. When you have that, you have kind of a map of, or at least, you know, you have the starting point and the end point of the article or the book that you're reading. It's a direction that the author's trying to go. This should really help guide you with the rest of your reading. If you have, you know, when you stop and when you stop at a part, a part of the text and you say, what does this have to do with what I'm reading? You return back to that purpose and conclusion. That should give you, that should keep you on that path. You get lost with a particular passage, go back to the purpose of conclusion, figure out how that passage is supposed to get you from the question to that answer. The terms are the major concepts that the author's going to use along the way. They are the words that need to be defined. They need to be clarified. There are those definitions that are going to be important. I mean, some words in the text, not all words are important in the text, or equally important. Not all words are equally important in the text. Some are more important than others. The terms are the ones that are more important than others. Kind of a linchpin for the whole, for the whole discussion. Finding terms in the text can be a tricky business. But again, one place where you start is the table of contents. Chances are the words that are important, the text are mentioned, and the section titles in the table of contents, or the section titles just within the text. Start there. When you start to see those words pop up time and time again, I'm not talking about things like is, or the, with, prepositions, pronouns, probably not that important. But when you start dealing with proper names, or anything that's capitalized that way, right, nouns that have capitalized that way, chances are that's going to be important, and you ought to pay attention to it. If a word is mentioned again, and again, and again, right, chances are that's a term that needs to be defined. If the author takes the time to define a term, to actually give a definition, you probably ought to write that down. That's going to be important. These sorts of things are, these sorts of clues, we're going to tell when you get an important term. So you've got purpose, the question of the philosopher trying to enter, you have the conclusion, what the philosopher believes answered that question, and now you have terms. The major concepts, these concepts, these definitions, these meanings, that the philosopher is going to use to get from that question to that answer. Next are the judgments that are constructed using those terms. Judgments or reasons or evidence are usually going to be composed of those terms, right? When you start to see more than one of those terms together in a single sentence, that's probably a judgment. So yeah, the judgments, it's the evidence. It's the reasons, the justification for the conclusion. It's, you know, the philosopher is trying to go from the purpose to the conclusions, going to take certain steps along the way. That evidence, those judgments, those are the steps. And how those fit together, those steps fit together is how the philosopher reaches the conclusion. So that's the purpose, the question, the philosopher trying to answer, the conclusion, what philosopher believes answers that question. You've got the concepts, right? The terms that the philosopher is going to use, and how those terms fit together is going to construct the reasons, right? The judgments, the evidence that the philosopher is going to use to infer that conclusion. When you have all of this, the question, the purpose, the conclusion, the terms, these judgments, these reasons, that's when you have what you need to construct the argument. Now hopefully, whoever's done the right and the author has done a good job of putting that argument together for you already, don't always count on it. Sometimes you have to do a better job of constructing the argument than the philosopher or whoever is writing whatever you're reading. And that's going to take practice, that's going to take a lot of knowledge and by the way, you know, logic. So the purpose, the conclusion, the terms, the judgments, this should help you put together the argument. When you have that, you understand how the philosopher thinks you get from the purpose to the conclusion. There's one last thing to look out for. There's probably at least one other thing that philosophers are particularly going to deal with in an article and that's addressing, like mentioning and replying to objections, right? Objection would be some sort of argument or reason to reject the conclusion that the philosopher is trying to answer. Okay, so you should also mention this in your outline when a philosopher is dealing with an objection. This isn't necessarily part of the argument, it's just anticipating potential problems with it or frankly just reason why people may not adopt it. So again, in your outline, you should mention the objection and how and where, right? You should mention where and how the philosopher thinks that this objection can be rebutted. So you give me the purpose, the conclusion, and the outline. I really don't want you to give me the long list of terms and the judgments, right? Hopefully you've got that all on your own. For the purposes of the reading quiz, I only want the purpose, conclusion, and the outline. And the outline, again, you just tell me where in the reading the philosopher is accomplishing this task. So Aristotle defines virtue on page, or here, Aristotle defines virtue. And then you give me the citation. And the citation is open parentheses, the page number of full stopper period and the paragraph number to the best that you can figure that part out. Close parentheses. I don't need the author, the publisher, the editor. I don't need any of that. I already know where you're getting the reading from. I gave it to you. The citation is just that. The page number, the period, the paragraph number, all in close in parentheses. In that order, by the way, page number, period, paragraph number, and that parentheses. Do not give me quotes. I don't want quotes. Quotes tell me, maybe at most, that you understand that the passage is important or relevant, but it doesn't tell me that you understand it. Instead, tell me what the philosopher is doing at that point, right? Defines such as such, right? Here, Aristotle defines habits. Here, Aristotle defines virtues. Excuse me. Here, Aristotle defines habits. Here, Aristotle defines the golden mean. Here is where Aristotle makes the judgment that the virtue is a habit that has the golden mean, right? That would be, you know, each with numbered entry. That would be what you'd be doing for the outline. Numbered entry with the citations. Do not give me quotes. Do not give me quotes. Do not give me quotes. I want citations, not quotes. So these reading quizzes are not particularly lengthy writing assignments. They're not designed to be. The reading quizzes are merely to determine whether you've made an honest attempt at understanding the reading. So I just want the purpose, the conclusion, and the outline. What's the question the philosopher is trying to answer? What does the philosopher believe answers that question? And what are the steps in the reading that the philosopher takes along the way? Now, they're not lengthy writing assignments, but they're pretty substantive, right? This is the meat, the hard core part of the readings, right? What you're supposed to understand and the readings. Now, these are not lengthy, but it wouldn't be hard to take these reading quizzes and then turn them into something lengthy. With this material, right, the purpose, the conclusion, the terms, the judgments, you should be able to create something like a 900-word summary of the readings, which is a very, I'm not requiring that, but that's a very valuable skill in and of itself. I'm really not exaggerating. The material that you write down for these reading quizzes is basically what you'd have in something like a 900-word or three, or excuse me, three-page summary of any given article. And this is valuable work, right? This is comprehending the material, whether you're doing an extensive research paper or just simply a little book report or just a little summary of an article or reading. It's this information that's going to do the trick. Now, I really haven't gone into it too much in these short videos. You can look at other videos that I have when it comes to defining terms, but when it comes to defining terms, yeah, that work can be accomplished in about, if you're being very, very careful, very precise with the words with about 100 words, you get to find a term. Most times probably closer to 300, 200 to 300. I've yet to see a paper in Humanities that didn't require defining at least three terms. And then again, this is good work. This is comprehension, understanding what the philosopher's trying to answer, what the philosopher really answers that question, the major concepts along the way, how those concepts come together to form the judgments, how all these judgments come together to form the argument overall, that's work and comprehension. But then this is how you write and construct these longer writing assignments. All of a sudden, three pages is a piece of cake, 10 pages is an afternoon, 20 pages just for fun. So when you start to get into 50 pages, 50 pages, okay, that's more a little bit longer of an exercise. But filling that word count isn't really going to be the problem anymore. The problem is keeping under it.