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Reflections on Inspectional Reading
Like many people, I have a huge book backlog. I have books that I’ve intended to read for many moons, many moves, and many homes. While Kindle and library usage has made this some better, I can’t claim that my throughput rate in any way matches my acquisition rate. What’s to be done?
As noted in my post on Adler and van Doren’s How to Read a Book, “Inspectional Reading (IR)” is a two-phase technique that answers the question of whether a book requires deeper (“Analytical”) reading to be understood and whether the reader will benefit from such an understanding. The first phase locates the “big reveal” of the argument and its key premises first. In the second phase, the reader works to embellish that scaffolding here and there but moves through the content quickly.
As a result, readers have an augmented skeleton of the book such that the skeletal elements are fitted to the premises in a way that nets the conclusion.
I used this technique on Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?.
My determination is that IR, when practiced consciously, with notepad handy, does produce a strong grasp of non-fiction materials. For this book, I invested approximately 90 minutes of time and finished with several good ideas that I could present in cocktail party conversation and will likely integrate into some of the educational material my team curates.
Inspectional Read: Why Don't Students Like School
How to Read a Book
I found this book a few years ago on the sidewalks of Park Slope and I regret I haven’t read it sooner!
Adler and van Doren provide a wonderful set of techniques for getting a better grip on your “To Read” pile and help you feel more comfortable in choosing what level of attention is appropriate for the material. By making this calculation in an informed and methodical way, you can process your pile more effectively. I really needed this help because I’m such a completionist, I’m always afraid I’m going to lose a critical fact if I’m not diligent to the end degree. I hope these techniques will help me move more quickly and exercise better judgment.
Having provided those techniques, the authors provide a very considerate introduction on how to read books in genres that you might not be comfortable in: science, social science, or philosophy.
Over and above those practical points, the book serves as a good set of advice on how to do anything actively: active listening, active reading, active programming, active conversation, etc. The skills of acting actively, we’d say “mindfully” today, were seen as related to reading and writing when this book came out in 1940, but the truths that underlie that view have not changed. I found many places where “read/write a book” could have been swapped with “read/write code” or “converse” or “learn to play guitar” or “meditate” or “make tender love to” and the value been as impactful.
This book in the right hands at the right time could make for a huge change in educational quality and life quality of the reader.
This is all the “reviewing” I’ll do here. Below I’ll cover the techniques and distillations I made of the text. I’m posting them here for quick reference :).