HOW to Read A page
A COURSE IN EFFICIENT READING WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO 100 GREAT WORDS
BY I. A. RICHARDS
Copyright, 1942 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number : 59-6393 .

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PREFIX ANYONE who really asks himself why he wants to read better finds himself answering himself out of the heart of philosophy. So this little book, which begins by considering Misreading and goes on to pick the hundred or so words we can least afford to fumble, turns (see Conversion in the Index), through watching this central service at work and studying its Master Words, inevitably into reflection on the Why of whys. Re-reading it, I am struck again by the help the later parts give the earlier. and in discussing it -- through sixteen years -- with other readers, I have learnt that many of them would have had a better time, and made better time, if they had leapt from the end of Chapter I to the Retrospect and passed then through Chapters VI to XII, returned thence to the minuter anatomizing of Chapters II to V. In this way they would have seen sooner what the book is about and what it is for. Its ultimate theme is Purpose ; its own purpose being to offer, through a clearer eye for what we do as we think, a juster position for living.
    I am happy that in this new form it becomes more widely available.
I. A. R.
1958

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CONTENTS

PREFACE		7
Introduction		9
CHAPTER   I.	How a Reader Might Improve	17
CHAPTER  II.	An Obvious Characteristic of All Animals	26
CHAPTER III.	To Learn, Compare	40
CHAPTER IV.	Random Scratching and Clawing	57
CHAPTER  V.	To Unite, abstract	71
CHAPTER VI.	The Warfare of Heart and Head	97
CHAPTER VII.	The Choice of Key Words	110
CHAPTER VIII	Part-Whole Shifts and Content Changes	132
CHAPTER IX.	Make, Get, Give, Love, Have	143
CHAPTER  X.	Seem, Be, Do, See	160
CHAPTER XI.	Mind, Thought, Idea, Knowledge	186
CHAPTER XII.	Reason, Purpose, Work	210
	Retrospect	235
Index		243

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INTRODUCTION

A SLIP of the log I am sitting on by my campfire under Mount Sir Donald has given me as an alternative title, "How to reap a page," which perhaps better suggests the aim. We assume we know how to read : spell it r e a p, and we begin to wonder how we do it.
    Twenty years ago a very inexperienced writer commenced authorships with the remark, "A book is a machine to think with."¹ Here he is trying to devise another sort of verbal machine : something which may be a help in using books as machines to think with. . . . (more) . . . 7 pages . . .

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ONE
HOW A READER MIGHT IMPROVE
Education : expansion of experience by experts. -- C. K. Ogden

WE all enjoy the illusion that we read better than we do ; not least, no doubt, those who set out to write about How to read. But most of us -- or those at least, who are likely to open a book with this title -- are satisfied that other people read badly, that they can miss any point and will put their own wild interpretations on even the most obvious remark. In recent years books, papers, and articles which labor this point and accuse the general reader of incompetence with language have been coming out in plenty. Some of them hint despondingly that things are getting worse and threaten us even with universal intellectual collapse unless something is done about it. Authorities tell vast conferences of English teachers every few weeks that they are failing to teach reading. Texts simplified and written down to tenth-grade level are adopted in university courses because the undergraduates cannot, it is alleged, read anything harder. Publicists lament, in popular volumes, the plain man's helpless acceptance of verbal nonsense. specialists complain that their contributions are wasted because the other specialists do nothing but misread them. And prophets foretell the downfall of democracy through a decline in the citizen's ability to follow any discussion worth a hearing.
    Behind all this there is enough solid evidence to make anyone who studies it very uncomfortable. If most people's reading is really as inefficient as it seems when carefully enough examined, the main staff of education is hardly worth leaning on. What is the advantage of toiling on through thousands of pages, if a chief outcome is an accumulation of misunderstandings ? Surely it should be possible to go directly to the root of the trouble, to study verbal misunderstanding, its nature and cause, deeply enough to find and apply a cure?
   
    . . . (more) . . .
    . . . 7 pages . . .

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TWO
AN OBVIOUS CHARACTERISTIC OF ALL ANIMALS

When I raised my brows a little more, I saw the Master of those who know, seated amid the philosophic family. -- INFERNO IV, 131.

THE main source of any view, sound or silly, which we have of how we read must be our own observations of our own doings while we are reading. We should supplement this by observations of others' behavior and their reports, but inevitably in interpreting such other evidence we start from the return to that picture of a mind at work which only introspection can supply.
    . . (more) . . . . . . 12 pages . . .
   

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THREE
TO LEARN, COMPARE

No one can justly or successfully discover the nature of any one thing in that thing itself, or without numerous experiments which lead to farther inquiries
-- FRANCES of VERULAM's Great Instauration

WE may now pause to consider what, so far, in the process of reading as we have been observing it here in our minds, offers any suggestion toward a technique for improving reading. A number of points seem worth noting. I believe most reader will confirm them.

    1 . When . . . (more) . . .
    . . . 16 pages . . .

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FOUR
RANDOM SCRATCHING AND CLAWING

For however men may amuse themselves, and admire, or almost adore the mind, it is certain, that like an irregular glass, it alters the rays of things, by its figure, and different intersections. -- FRANCIS of VERULAM's Great Instaurantion

MY passages come from Chapters XII of R. G. Collingwood's Metaphysics.¹ Its title is "A Pseudo-Science Refutes Itself," which give us fair warning. The pseudo-science is psychology. I happen myself to have a strong prejudice against the sort of psychology Collingwood is attacking, and considerable sympathy with his philosophic positions as I understand them, so I seem to be well placed to observe his proceedings. He begins :

1 .
   . . . (more) . . . 8 pages . . .

   

NOTE
Specialized Quotation Marks

WE all recognize -- more or less unsystematically -- that quotation marks serve varied purposes.

1 . Sometimes they show . . . (more) . . . 4 pages . . .

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FIVE
TO UNITE, ABSTRACT

In answering he states the question, and expoundeth the terms thereof. Otherwise the disputants shall end, where th4ey ought to have begun, in differences about words, and be barbarous each to other, speaking in a language neither understands. -- THOMAS FULLER, Holy & Profane States 2, 55

THE last passage, if I have been right about it, has shown us how even a man of great ability and encyclopedic knowledge -- for Collingwood was all that -- can be carried into farcical misreading and injustice by a determination to make a passage mean what he wished it to mean. Not very surprisingly, he accuses McDougall of just the sort of thing he himself is doing. The plot against traditional views of thinking, which he invents for the psychologists, is an analog of his own plot against psychology.
    . . . (more) . . .
    . . . 26 pages . . .

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SIX
THE WARFARE OF HEART AND HEAD

   Doubt wisely ; in straight way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray ;
To sleepe, or runne wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddennes resists, winne so.
-- JOHN DONNE Satyre IIIM

A GREAT trouble with that archproblem ^qReason^q -- what should settle for us what is true ; what is the reader's guide to Truth? -- which set us inquiring into abstraction, is that this is not a ^rstrange way.^r Doubt as wisely as we may, the slope is seamed with familiar, well-beaten paths and dotted with notice-boards bearing most persuasive and reassuring inscriptions : "Scientific Method," "Intuition," "Faith" among them. All claim to point the way to Truth. Generations have worn the paths smooth, but what have they found ? Is there one Truth waiting to welcome them, or are the peaks many and crowned at best by empty shrines ? Sir Donald and the Asulkan peaks are wrapped in cloud as I write and the night wind visits only a cairn on the highest summit. Our tracks on the snow about it turn down again. Donne's image is not very comforting to a mountaineer.
    . . . (more) . . .
    . . . 26 pages . . .

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SEVEN
THE CHOICE OF KEY WORDS

It appears to me that men know neither their acquirements nor their powers, but fancy their possessions greater and their faculties less than they are ; whence, either valuing the received arts above measure, they look out no farther ; or else, despising themselves too much, they exercise their talents upon lighter matters, without attempting the capital things of all. And hence the sciences seem to have their Hercules' Pillars, which bound the desires and hopes of mankind. -- FRANCES of VERULAM's Great Instauration

WHICH words should we study most if through them we are best to understand the others? This is the simplest formulation of our problem. We have seen above what the general principles guiding our answer must be. here I come down to detail, to how these words may be chosen and the reasons for preferring some to others.
    Throughout this inquiry we will be reminding ourselves of what we know already, and collecting our observations, rather than making any new discoveries. We may best start with a wide survey of the dictionary, which leads us to divide words, for our purpose into eight great classes :
    Class I . Words like white, soft, hot, loud, sweet, pleasant -- which stand for qualities in our experience which could not possibly be explained to anyone who, being blind from birth, or without skin or muscle sensibility (feeling), or deaf, or deficient in his taste organs had had no example of them in his experience.
    So we come back to a master rule of method : It is the sense of a word in a particular use which we have to consider first, not the general meaning, "the wide range of all its senses taken together," nor something we may suppose is common to them all. Later, after studying the various senses, we may go on to plot the word's range and ask if anything is common to its senses, and if so what. A knowledge of the patterns of these rangings is -- I have insisted -- the most valuable thing we can learn from the inquiry, for it is knowledge of the make-up of the universe including our own. But on the way to this we must take all the care we can to consider separately what each of these senses is, which together form the word's range. This master rule applies to all words whatever.
    Class II . Words like  table, skunk, apricot, finger, cloud, rainbow -- which stand for common objects. That is, here, for things which people may have before them in common, things they can point out to one another and talk about with no reasonable doubt that they are talking of the same things. What they say or think about them may be different, but at least they differ about a common thing. Whether the thing is "common" in the sense of "frequently to be seen somewhere" does not matter. A new star which only two astronomers have seen is a common object to them. So would be a cry which only two people heard.
    . . . (more) . . . 2 pages . . .
    Class III . Words like shake, jump, twist, throw -- which stand for acts we can perform or could point to, as we talk of them. Somewhat similar questions come up with these as with the words in Class II. When a lamp throws its light on the page, is that the same sense of "throw" and is it to be put in Class III ?
    . . . (more) . . . 5 pages . . .
    Class IV . Words like in, on, at, you, I, or, now, that, too, but, except, while, though, only, then -- which link up qualities, things, events, situations or words, parts of sentences, sentences and paragraphs, etc. to one another in multifarious ways. There are not a great number of these words and they are mostly short ones, but they do an enormous amount of work. We learn what they do through having to use them so much. They are not easy to learn -- witness the struggles of any foreign learner, or the amount of a good grammar book which has to be given up to trying to say what they may and may not do. But though we would be hard put to it to supply an adequate account of their work, we normally manage them well enough. The exceptions occur mostly when the manifold senses of the words they link up allow equal chances of linking then up in two or more ways. When this is so the fault is probably in the whole sentence or passage, and it may be unfair to blame the little word.
    Class V . Words like beautiful, true, good, exquisite, haggard, abstract, malicious, peculiar, probable, dominant, clean, clear -- which assign qualities to things and events. These are not like the names of sensory qualities of Class I. With these in Class V we can at least make a reasonable attempt to give an account of their meanings. They are not tied to simple, unanalyzable qualities of sense-experience. May of these accounts will be in terms of what the things having them do to us (thrilling), or what we or others have done to them (precious); or in terms of their relation to other events (probable); or in terms of the relations of their parts to one another (oblong). About some of them (the most discussed as usual ; the first three, for example) there is room for much doubt about the sort of account which should be given. Many have said that "beautiful" and "good" have, as their fundamental and serious meanings, simple qualities as unanalyzable as the sense-quality red -- though they are not sense-qualities. Others have said, with equal confidence, that they are analyzable, in different ways : into terms of pleasure caused under certain circumstances to certain people or into terms of the aim of man's existence, and so on. We shall be looking into some of these accounts later. Here I will remark merely that these are questions not about the meaning (right meaning, only true meaning, proper meaning) of a word, but about one or some of their meanings. Such words are certainly used (and rightly) in many ways.
    Class VI . Words like relation, quality, religion, property, preparation, amount, competition, description, name, energy, way, thing, mind, object, experience -- which we certainly cannot make clear by pointing to the things they name. Some of our senses, in some places, give no trouble. But among them re the hardest words to manage successfully either in writing or in reading. We use them by the hundreds and are polite enough to one another to pretend we understand. But, to quote the experience Bacon,

The error is both in the deliverer and in the receiver. He that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such form as may be soonest believed and not as may be easiliest examined. . . . As in the courts and services of princes and states, it is a much easier matter to give satisfaction than to do the business.

    Class VII . Words like involve, suppose, imply, profess, assign, compete, organize, divide, demonstrate, govern, know, observe -- which name acts we cannot demonstrate as we might shake or throw. These are in many cases connected with nouns in Class VI (compete-competition), and what is said about those holds here, but slightly more so. For a verb frequently adds some further opportunity to misread from which the corresponding abstract noun escapes, the noun naming a part or an outcome or a condition of the whole state, situation, or process the verbs covers. Finally
    Class VIII . Words like be, have, do, get, give, make, seem, see-- the verbs of widest utility, which sometimes are but empty neutral links between the parts of the sentences they unite. Then they are faithful reflectors which only reinforce the influences they exchange, but sometimes they make violent interventions of their own, changing everything.
    These, roughly sketched, are for our purposes the great divisions of the language. A synopsis of the classification may be convenient.

I . Simple sense-qualities
II . Common objects
III. Acts (and metaphoric extensions to physical events)
IV. Logical-linguistic links
V . Higher qualities
VI . Problem nouns
VII. Problem verbs
VIII. General verb operators

    Which of them contain the key words we are seeking ?
    It will be clear enough that we may pass by the first three classes. They present problems -- which I have touched on -- but those problems must be discussed with words from the other classes and will turn on our handling of those other words. And of the words in Class IV the same is true They are flexible shorthand for indicating relations which are covered by words of the last three classes. but some of the words we are looking for will be in Class V --good, beautiful, true are certainly among them. Which others ? And how will we choose them ?
    Here Mr. C. K. Ogden's vast researches into the substitutability of English words -- under certain conditions and for certain purposes -- leading to his invention of Basic English, come into our picture. * * * (more) * * *
    . . . (more) . . . 5 pages . . .
. . . These words, however -- though whatever understanding we can attain of them is all-important to us -- are not tools of thought as the other words in the List are. Life sometimes is, but the inclusion of living among the adjectives takes care of that.³ The same reflections, in a less degree, apply to Time and Space.
    . . . (more) . . . 2 pages . . .
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1. See my lecture, "The Interactions of Word," in The Language of Poetry (Measures Lectures, Princeton), and Practical Criticism, Chapter VII, "Doctrine in Poetry."
2. For further information on these aspects of Basic English consult Basic in Teaching -- East and West ; Psyche Miniature, Kegan Paul, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Arts, V. LXXXVII, No. 4515, June 2nd, 1939 ; Interpretation in Teaching, Chapter XI ; Semantics, Hugh H. Walpole, Norton, 1941.
3. The reader might be interested in one sample here of Mr. Ogden's explorations of the multiple used of our most familiar words. Here are thirty things which "living" will say for us : contemporary (the greatest living authority on the art of war) ; animated (he was a living skeleton) ; burning (he took up the living coal) ; still in vernacular use (living languages ) ; realistic (the living image of the man) ; maintenance (his living expenses were high) ; subsistence (high cost of living) ; conducting oneself (way of living) ; capable of vital function (living tissue) ; feeding (living on lettuce) ; luxuriating (living on the fat of the land) ; not separated from (still living with his wife) ; having immoral relations (living with a woman) ; sponging (living on his relations) ; pushing expenditure (living up to one's income) ; spending one's energies (living fast) ; wearing (living down a prejudice) ; enjoying (a life worth living) ; afloat (no vessel could be living in that sea) ; continuing (living in the memory of mankind) ; surviving (living after death) ; composed of humans (living statuary) ; for general use (living room) ; leading (living a life of crime) ; sleeping (living at an address) ; inhabiting (living in a house) ; dwelling (living in a town) ; residing (living in a suburb) ; existing (living in poverty) ; being a vagabond (living nowhere). Thus do words work on one another.

   

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EIGHT
PART-WHOLE SHIFTS AND CONTENT CHANGES

These . . . escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious ; an the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.
-- EDGAR ALLAN POE, The Purloined Letter

A CERTAIN distinction between two ways in which words change their meanings should be pointed out now. If I can make it clear here much which might seem hard in what follows will become easy. It is an unfamiliar rather than a difficult distinction.
    I will illustrate it first with two words which cause no trouble ; we understand them very well indeed in all the varieties of their behavior. The first is the word addition.
    . . . (more) . . . 8 pages . . .

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NINE
MAKE, GET, GIVE, LOVE, HAVE

Mencius said, "Words near, meaning far, good words ; keeping simple, application extensive, good principle." -- MENCIUS VII, ii, 32

FOR me, with the three largest English dictionaries yawning around me, the chief difficulty here is to select, from among the vast varieties of these words' uses, those which will most repay special study. The master rule is : If to note some point in a word's behavior will help us, not with that word only but with scores of other words as well, then that point deserves our best attention. As I have insisted, the modes of the shifts and changes of meaning recur and recur in different words. . . . (more) . . . 16 pages . . .
   

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TEN
SEEM, BE, DO, SEE

I've looked as far as I can see --
Though that's not far -- down into me ;
If you have seen as much of you
And tell me it's a pretty sight,
Look again, and take a light.
    RALPH HODGSON, Silver Wedding (1941)

AS we would suspect, this is a very deceitful word. The crux, as Plato made us see, is how we are to separate the things which can only SEEM from things which can BE in a further sense. What seems is ; the seemings at least are ; but there are other deeper senses of BEING, and it is against these that we may ask : Does the world oft he senses only seem to us ? Are what it consists of all only seemings ? But notice then -- as with the cry only two men heard in Chapter Seven -- how ambiguous ^qthe world of the senses^q becomes.
    . . . (more) . . .
    . . . 26 pages . . .

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ELEVEN
MIND, THOUGHT, IDEA, KNOWLEDGE

And I do not want to talk that language of spiritual expiration which is nothing but words.
-- T.S. ELIOT, Towards a Christian Britain,108

WE now take up a group of words of which we may safely say that understanding hem is understanding their interconnections. The senses of these words are so sensitive to one another that even to read them over a different orders is to set shadowy dramas moving in the background of our awareness. What we have to attempt is to bring these dramas -- these interactions -- forward slow them down, and simplify them till we can follow them.
    . . . (more) . . .
    . . . 23 pages . . .

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TWELVE
REASON, PURPOSE, WORK, RETROSPECT

There are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands. they are not original with me.
WALT WHITMAN, Song of Myself

AFTER these long approaches we come at last to our archproblem : what should rule our reading -- of the page, of one another, of the world.

REASON

    In the sense which goes with the highest mode of knowledge, REASON is the dependence of all knowledge upon one principle. Only as viewed through or with that would all become reasonable. But we do not view with that, and study of the stages of our unreason, better suits with our degree. Corresponding to each grade of knowledge is a sense of ^wreason,^w and it will be wisest to begin at the foot of the ladder.
    . . . (more) . . .
    . . . 25 pages . . .

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RETROSPECT

Set thee up way marks, make thee high heaps : set thine heart toward the highway, even the way which thou wentest : turn again, O virgin of Israel, turn again to these   Thy cities.
JEREMIAH XXXI : 21

LET us look back now across the wide landscape to some of the landmarks and turning points in or journey. Near the start, very soon after our first study of Aristotle's account of ^rexperience,^r we came up against a doctrine of usage -- as ruling all right use of words -- which had to be tackled or turned. I preferred, in Chapter Three, to turn that formidable obstacle, and from this point we can see what a forbidding barrier it is.
    Anyone who believes that usage fixes the meanings of words -- in the customary form of that belief -- cannot advance far in knowledge either of how he reads or of how to read. But I had better try to state this customary form of belief, though, as with so many such obstructions, the very attempt to state them tends to transform them into something else which no one will support. Compare the newspaper-believer's lowliest sort of REASON, "If it's said, it's so." He will deny that he believes this, but he acts as though he did.
    In its most dangerous and baffling form the belief holds that a word when rightly used carries one only meaning (or exceptionally two or three), and that reading is essentially collecting these right meanings and a sort of adding them together. Now let us first say quickly all that can be said in favor of this doctrine (it is not much), and then in looking over what may be said against it our eyes will follow almost all the main points on our journey hither.
    . . . (more) . . . 7 pages . . .

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INDEX