How do you read a book?
I was diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes a year ago. Since then I always want to have a systematic study on how to prevent complications, plan my diet and exercises.
I just need to figure out where to begin all this.
My current plan is to use the DK's Diabete's Handbook as a lead-in, which I hope could give me a systematic overview, and then I plan to add more articles and books to each part of the topic.
Then I start my plan last week by reading the handbook, but I notice I have no idea how to read a book. I admit it indeed sounds silly. I was a good student when I was in the college. Now I'm not. I don't know what to do when I go through each line, paragraph on the page.
So I'm wondering if anyone could share a realistic approach to read a book/books/article. By realistic, I mean I really hope it's not some theory education with really confused vocabularies. Think me like a 12 year old student, not some top scientists.
Thank you and wish you all well.
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My recommendations for reading are:
If I understand you well, your end goal is to "have a systematic study on how to prevent complications, plan my diet and exercises".
Reading is a way to get the necessary knowledge to achieve the goal. However, just reading may not be enough to get that knowledge (because, maybe, the books or articles you want to read are too hard to understand or apply directly).
So, one way to solve this problem is to read and process what you read. This way, you will be able to get knowledge even from hard-to-understand sources.
In this sense, the Barbell Method of Reading is a workflow for reading sources (having in mind that later you want to process them), and the Knowledge Cycle is a reminder that is better to do short cycles of reading and processing.
The last thing is: How do you process a lecture?
Use the Zettelkasten Method :-)
For more advice for reading: you can check https://zettelkasten.de/overview/#reading
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” —Isaac Newton
eljardindegestalt.com
Good timing. Just watched this medical student's (Zain Asif) video last night. He talks about "reading in layers"; skim first to get big picture, reread for structure and key ideas, then final read to fill in all the stuff you missed, all the while writing down "Recall Questions" to help you remember what you read.
His approach is for studying, but would likely be helpful in tackling a big diabetes handbook.
Layering method:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AxqGN8WtLpA
The Barbell Method of reading is excellent advice and I always suggest to read with a pencil in hand. Aside from that I recently saw this video and found interesting the advice of synoptical reading and having a goal while reading. Another good insight for me was to STOP reading to actually give time to modify the habits in your life and start to practice what you learn.
Also this is an excellent resource, not only for advice on taking notes while reading, but regarding learning in general.
Good luck out there.
I had the same diagnosis 4 months ago. I did what it sounds like you also did - read as much as I could find, from various reputable sources, about the condition.
Before you get carried away with "old" (1980s/1990s) conventional wisdom, I recommend also learning about relatively "new" (2000+; still evolving) concepts in this area. A good place to start is Dr. Jason Fung's book "The Diabetes Code" (he is a Toronto doctor who specialized, to start, in kidney problems and has for the last 15-20 years run an obesity and diabetes clinic). His book is widely available and can be purchased at a low cost on Kindle (Amazon). This book opened my eyes, and, at least in my N=1 experiment, his advice was right on target.
Sounds like you might be interested in doing a syntopic read of the topic as it affects your particular health. Here, I'd highly recommend the following which lays out several methods of reading which are sure to help your process immensely:
Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.
Starting with a handbook as an overview is certainly a good start.
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Let me throw something from another direction:
I am in a similar situation, though it doesn't look like it: I know very little about branding, need to learn about it and need to learn about it for purely utilitarian reasons.
My approach is to read a couple of books on the topic. They will provide the raw material that I need to build the structures in my Zettelkasten. However, I don't care so much about the "why" but more about the "how" and the "what". The intricate mechanics are only as interesting as the knowledge about enables me to action.
The top level structure will be a note that provides me with various tools (templates, checklists, etc.). The other, perhaps even more important, goal is to create both habits, reoccurring tasks/projects and one-off tasks/projects.
In your case, you need the same thing.
The hard part is rarely understanding/learning, nor it is the most important part. The bottleneck is almost always implementation. I could give you sufficient information on type II diabetes in a few thousand words and some images. But then you are still stuck with changing your life.
So, instead of thinking that you need to learn proper reading technique (which is beneficial on its own, of course), ask yourself, first, what you want to build from the raw material that accrues. This will give you a proper framework within which you can make informed reading decisions.
@GeoEng51 Does Fung make proper citations? (Footnotes/Endnotes)
I am a Zettler
Thank you for passing on this recommendation. It is a great book. It taught me that some of my Zettelkasten questions could be answered by improving my reading skills.
Sometimes it is a question of input quality:
More at: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/20552/#Comment_20552
But reading alone is not enough to learn, so I used some of the suggested methods to actively read the book itself. In the first stage of "Analytical Reading" there is a section about "The art of outlining a book". Adler proposed: "The author made his for writing. Make yours for reading well."
Here is my outline represented as a concept map:
The basic structure of the book, as I see it, helps me to identify connections on one page. Links to existing notes in my Zettelkasten (black) are added.
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
@Edmund 😉 Glad you enjoyed it. I love your maps and diagrams. They remind me of prettier, more sharable versions of what Victor Margolin's process included:
I've always felt that, despite that we know Adler helped to create a group-based zettelkasten, in some sense because of how he marked his books, he really kept his personal zettelkasten in the endpapers of his own books shelved on the walls of his personal library. He never did (or did he?) the extra work of taking his permanent notes out of his books and filing them away in some order or another. I do wonder if he kept a central repository either in card or notebook form of a list of all his personal notes indexed by topic or subject the way we would keep a subject index of our own ZKs as entry points of our own reading and writing?
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Since, I am working on material for the upcoming member's area, I was reminded by Christian that I read Adler/Van Doren's book quite a long time ago. I didn't make the connection because I read it in the German translation.
I absolutely don't think that this book is of big help, even though it can teach a lot about reading.
It is very similar to book about sport. You can learn a lot about sport, but reading about sport only makes sense if you are already at least an intermediate.
A good book about reading should be more like a workbook that organises exercises and trainings in a didactic series. It cannot be a bird's view description of the matter.
I remember that I was very disappointed by the book.
The deeper problem is that such books give you a positive feeling while at the same time failing to deliver good results. This is a common pattern that I see in quite some domains like health/fitness.
I will re-read this book in a while to substantiate this opinion (or, if I am very lucky, to change it). But I am pessimistic.
I am a Zettler
The early 1940 edition wasn't as expansive as the later re-writes with Van Doren in 1972 and onward. To me, the most valuable ideas are those of "coming to terms" with an author and syntopical reading, which the majority of people rarely perform and if they do so, it takes some reasonable practice to do well. Those who have a zettelkasten practice are likely to appreciate the specific advice of how this should be done in their areas of interest.
Their series of videos are a nice overview/review of some of the material in the book:
How to Read a Book. Los Angeles: KCET, 1975.
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I will for sure evaluate this book once more.
It might be because of my background as a trainer. But I am very suspicious of self-reporting. We, people, do self-reporting with very low accuracy in many areas of life.
I watched the first three videos and enjoy them very much. But this doesn't translate into change in behaviour or skills for anybody.
The more I learn within the field of knowledge work, the more I see the same pattern as in health and fitness: A LOT of the content both digital and analogue is mostly entertaining and a big portion of the motivation of the audience is entertainment.
I sympathise with Nassim Taleb in that point: Most of the intellectual material is ornamental.
Also: Many of the techniques and methods work fine without having a Zettelkasten. But the Zettelkasten Method makes a lot obsolete.
EDIT: I don't dismiss the value of such a book as you can see I am using methods similar to the methods presented in the book: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/field-report-5-reading-processing-effective-notetaking-mcpherson/
But all the books, this included, is bloated compared to the practical content.
I am a Zettler
Yes, it is the 1972 edition I'm just reading. And I've already found the connection between active reading and note-making (p.51):
Finding key words and through them "coming to terms" with the author (p.98 ff.) is a process that will strongly influence my future work with my Zettelkasten. The "structural note-making" is a concept from "analytical reading" which could be supported by using concept maps. SimpleMind is my favorite tool for this.
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
Reading two books and playing with it's ideas. Here is my structure note from syntoptical reading:
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
Adler & Ahrens on making notes:
Both claim that linking notes during the notemaking process facilitates writing later.
Ahrens claims that there is great value in keeping your entire life's notes in one container, to facilitate linking across distant domains.
Adler's syntopical reading amalgamates notes from multiple texts for a given project or question, but does not amalgamate notes across projects.
Adler claims that the links that count between notes are links that represent causal or logical inferences.
Ahrens makes vague references to arguments but encourages linking based on little more than gut feeling (intuition).
Thank you so much! This is a great example of dialectical note-making, with lots of similarities and differences from both books. I'd love to know your personal strategy for combining some of these concepts for your own note-making.
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.
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Please see my comments, below.
Me too.
Me too.
I'm with Ahrens, not Adler.
Me too.
I'm with Adler, not Ahrens.
Hi, Edmund, it's been a while as I manage to get myself into remission and now restart my daily study sessions. I've finished reading "How to take smart notes", and it was truly an enlightenment. Now, I just saw your replies on outlining a book and read the book "How to read a book", I wonder how do you do the outlining thing. Do you write a outline simultaneously when you read a book, or is it more like a routine session after you finish reading a huge chunk?
My simple process:
1. Read and mark key terms and key propositions.
2. After each chapter transfer to visual canvas.
3. Connect the dots in a logical context
4. Reread book if logic is still unclear.
5. Update map.
6. Finally polish map.
Edmund Gröpl
Writing is your voice. Make it easy to listen.