#reading-practices — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #reading-practices, aggregated by home.social.
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TIL: Moon+ Reader Pro has RSVP technology hiding in it’s settings! This is going to dramatically help my inspectional reading this year. -
Replied to Gutting Book Basics by Thomas Vander Wal (vanderwal.net)
For those looking to delve in deeper to gutting books, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren go into greater depth in How to Read a Book (Touchstone, 1972, 2011) in which they discuss various levels of reading books with which many students are less familiar. They break reading down into various modes including inspectional reading, analytic reading, and syntopic reading which are the sorts of reading one should be able to accomplish by late high school or certainly by the college level. Unfortunately not too many people are reading this way anymore, if they ever did.I continually think I have written about gutting books in the past, but have only mentioned it and alluded to it. When I bring it up I often get asked about and want to point to my explanation, as there are few resources elsewhere (there is one that surfaced in 2009 from Naomi Standen guiding her students How to gut a book).
Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, reprint/translation 2015 [1977]) goes into greater depth on taking one’s guttings and turning them into new material.
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Paul Conkin’s Zettelkasten Advice
In the second lecture of David Blight's Devane Lecture Series 2024 entitled “Can It Happen Here Again? Yale, Slavery, the Civil War and Their Legacies”, he makes a passing mention of historian, professor, and prolific writer Paul Conkin's office desk and side tables being covered in index cards full of notes. Further, he says that Conkin admonished students that for every hour they spend reading, they should spend an hour in reflection. The comment is followed by a mention that no one [...]
https://boffosocko.com/2024/09/16/paul-conkins-zettelkasten-advice/
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I’m in a book club (comprised of academics, historians, inveterate note takers, commonplacers, zettelkasten users, and lifelong learners) that is just starting the 1972 (or later) revised edition of Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren’s How to Read a Book. Our first Zoom session covering chapters 1-5 is Saturday, August 9th at 8:00 am (Pacific). Email Dan with the details at the original listing to get the details for joining or DM me directly.
We’re pretty laid back, especially for Saturday mornings, so grab your favorite beverage and join us to talk about reading and intellectual history. If you’re joining late, feel free to stop by and join in knowing that you can catch up as we continue along for the coming month or so.
#book-clubs #mortimer-j-adler #reading-practices #zettelkasten
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After Ahrens’ book I see an awful lot of people talking about “processing” books. There are too many assumptions about what this can mean and this hides many levels of inherent work involved in analyzing and synthesizing knowledge. I would suggest that we’re better off talking about reading them, annotating, excerpting, and thinking about them, or maybe writing about and combining them with other knowledge than “processing” them.
#annotations #ars-excerpendi #processing #reading-practices #sonke-ahrens