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In today’s lecture, we are going to talk about how to mark a book. You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to "write between the lines". Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
    Why is marking up a book absolutely necessary to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don’t mean merely conscious; I mean wide-awake. ) In the second place, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me develop these three points.
    If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can’t let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, Gone with the Wind, doesn’t require the most active kind of reading. The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. You don’t absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the story of David Copperfield. You have to reach for them. That you cannot do while you are asleep.
    But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.
    Don’t let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two way operation; learning doesn’t consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marking a book is literally an expression of your differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.
    There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here’s the way I do it:
    1. Underlining: of major points, of important or forceful statements.
    2. Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
    3. Star, asterisk, or other marks at the margin: to be used economically, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won’t hurt the strong paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able to take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book. )
    4. Numbers in the margin: to Indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.
    5. Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points related to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.
    6. Circling of key words or phrases.
    7. Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the pages: for the sake of recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the endpapers at the back of the book to make a personal index or the author’s points in the order of the appearance.
    Or. you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That’s one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly, and some should be read slowly and even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you--how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim. as it should be, you will not be impatient ff it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a newspaper.