Similarly, a nonfiction book will usually have a concise statement of the main idea in towards the end of the introductory chapter.How to read a book

Since reading of any sort is an activity, all reading must to some degree be active. Completely passive reading is impossible; we cannot read with our eyes immobilized and minds asleep. Hence when we contrast active with passive reading, our purpose is, first, to call attention to the fact that reading can be more or less active, and second, to point out that the more active the reading the better. One reader is better than another in proportion as he is capable of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort. He is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him.

The goals of reading:  Reading for information and reading for understanding.

The book consists of language written by someone for the sake of communicating something to you. Your success in reading it is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer intended to communicate. That, of course, is too simple. The reason is that there two possible relations between your mind and the book, not just one. These two relations are exemplified by two different experiences that you can have in reading your book.
There is the book; and here is your mind. As you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly the author has to say or you do not. If you do, you may have gained information, but you could have have increased

Thus we can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follows: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

We can employ the word "reading" in two distinct senses. The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading news-papers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us. Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot increase our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth----that is, if we were both alert and honest.

The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand. Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader's understanding. Such communication between unequal must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by "learning" is meant understanding more, not resembling more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.

Not only show more facts but also to throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts he knows. If he can manage to acquire greater understanding, he is reading in the second sense. He has indeed elevated himself by his activity, though indirectly, of course, the elevation was made possible by the writer who had something to teach him.

What are the conditions under which this kind of reading --reading for understanding----takes place? There are two. First, there is initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be "superior" to the reader in understanding, and his book must convey in readable form the insights he possesses and his potential readers lack. Second, the reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always approaching equality the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.

Reading as learning: The difference between learning by instruction and learning by observation.

Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning.
To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what is it all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.

This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it. If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or a fact about the world that you have learned, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

In the history of education, men have distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. Instruction occurs when one person teaches another through speech or writing. We can, however,  gain knowledge without being taught. If this was not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he in turn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery--the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.
Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.

When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operation of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than discourse. The rules of such learning constitute the art of unaided discovery. If we use the word "reading" loosely, we can say that discovery---strictly, unaided discovery--is the art of reading nature or the world, as instruction (being taught, or aided discovery) is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse. [Grand Qur'aan emphasizes to learn by discovery also]

Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one's senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed. There is, again, a tendency to stress the role of these activities in the process of unaided discovery and to forget or minimize their place in the process of being taught through reading or listening.
The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection. The reason for this is that reading in this sense is discovery, too---although with help instead of without it.

Present and Absent teacher

We have been proceeding as if reading and listening could both be treated as learning from teachers. To some extent that is true. Both are ways of being instructed, and for both one must be skilled in the art of being taught. Listening to a course of lectures, for example, is in many respects like reading a book; and listening to a poem is like reading it. There is a good reason to place primary emphasis on reading, and let listening become a secondary concern. The reason is that listening is learning from a teacher who is present---a living teacher---while reading is learning from one who is absent.

If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself. 

Levels of reading

The goal a reader seeks determines the way he reads. The effectiveness with which he reads is determined by the amount of effort and skill he puts into his reading.
In general the rule is: the more effort the better, at least in the case of books that are initially beyond our powers as readers and are therefore capable of raising us from a condition of understanding less to one of understanding more. Finally, the distinction between instruction and discovery (or between aided and unaided discovery) is important because most of us, most of the time, have to read without anyone to help us. Reading, like unaided discovery, is learning from an absent teacher. We can only do that successfully if we know how.

There are four levels of reading....

They are here called levels rather than kinds because kinds, strictly speaking, are distinct from one another, whereas it is characteristic of levels that higher ones include lower ones. So it is with the levels of reading, which are cumulative. The first level is not lost in the second, the second in the third, the third in the fourth. In fact, the fourth and highest level of reading includes all the other. It simply goes beyond them.

First level: Elementary Reading: This suggests that as one masters this level one passes from nonliterary to at least beginning literacy. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills. The name for this level Elementary reading is preferred because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school. [With reference to Qur'aan this level is recognizing nouns and verbs with the help of particles]
 

The child's first encounter with reading is at this level. His problem then is to recognize the individual words on the page. The attainment of the skills of elementary reading occurred some time ago for almost all of us. Nevertheless, we continue to experience the problem of this level of reading, no matter how capable we may be as readers. This happens, for example, whenever come upon something we want to read that is written in a foreign language that we do not know very well. Then our first effort must be to identify the actual words. Only after recognizing them individually we begin to try to understand them, to struggle with perceiving what they mean.

Second level of reading: Inspectional Reading: It is characterized by its special emphasis on time.

Another name for this level is skimming or pre-reading. When reading at this level, your aim is to examine the surface of the book, to learn everything that the surface alone can teach you. The question at first level is "What does the sentence say?"/ At second level the question is "What is the book about?". That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are "What is the structure of the book?" or "What are its parts?" After this level one should be able to answer the question "What kind of a book is it?"

The third level of reading we call Analytical Reading. It is both a more complex and a more systematic activity than either of the two level of reading discussed so far. Depending on the difficulty of the text to be read, it makes more or less heavy demands on the reader.

Francs Bacon once remarked that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested," Reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it.

Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

The fourt and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading. It is the most complex and systematic reading of all. Another name for this level might be comparative reading. [Tasreef, tadabur]

Newmark (1988a, 1988b) points out that in order to b able to translate a text, one has to understand it and analyse it first. For this reason, translation theories should have a criteria to be followed by the translator. The intention of text -the translator has to forget about his/her own views about a subject and translate it following the author's intention and never alter it. The intention of the translator -whether s/he is trying to reproduce the emotiveness of the original, or whether s/he is trying to combine the cultural sense of the SL.

Level 1

(i) Visually recognizing and distinguishing the individual words which are nouns and verbs in Grand Qur'aan with the help of particles and other peculiar visual features.

(ii)  Visually recognizing the Prepositional Phrase, Possessive Phrase, and Adjectival Phrase.

(iii) Memorizing Personal Pronouns, Demonstrative Pronouns, Relative Pronouns.

(iv) Memorizing conjunctive Particles: Waw, Fa, Summa; their meanings and use.

Intelligent action depends on knowledge. Knowledge can be used in many ways, not only for controlling nature and inventing useful machines or instruments but also for directing human conduct and regulating man's operation in various fields of skill.

Any guidebook is a practical book. Any book that tells you either what you should do or how to do it is practical.

Strictly speaking, any ethical work teaches us how to live our lives, tells us what we should and not do, and often informs us of the rewards and punishments attached to doing and not doing it. Thus, whether or not we agree with its conclusions, any such work is practical.

Sometimes you can detect that a book is practical by its title.

A practical book will soon betray its character by the frequent occurrence of such words as "should" and "ought", "good" and "bad" and "means". The characteristic statement in a practical book is one that says that something should be done (or made); or that this is the right way of doing (or making) something; or that one thing is better than another as an end to be sought or a means to be chosen. In contrast, a theoretical book keeps say "is," not "should" or "ought". It tries to show that something is true, that these are the facts; not that things would be better if they were otherwise, and here is the way to make them better.

The essence of history is narration. History is knowledge of particular events or things that not only existed in the past but also underwent a series of changes in the course of time. The historian narrates these happenings and often colors his narrative with comments on, or insight into, the significance of the events.

History is chronotopic. Chronos is the Greek word for time, topos the Greek word for place. History always deals with things that existed or events that occurred on a particular date and in a particular place.

First stage of Analytical Reading, or Rules for Finding What a Book is About

1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter

2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity.

3. Estimate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole.

4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.

Second stage of Analytical Reading: It also comprises four rules of reading.

Coming to Terms with an Author

Coming to terms is usually the last step in any successful business negotiation. All that remains is to sign on the dotted lines. But in the analytical reading of a book, coming to terms is the first step beyond the outline. Unless the reader comes to terms with the author, the communication of knowledge from one to the other does not take place. For a term is the basic element of communicable knowledge.

Words vs. Terms

A term is not a word----at least, not just a word without further qualifications. If a term and a word were exactly the same, you would only have to find the important words in a book in order to come to terms with it. But a word can have many meanings, especially an important word. If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, words have passed between them, but they have not come to terms. Where there is unresolved ambiguity in communication, there is no communication, or at best communication must be incomplete.
Communication is an effort on the part of one person to share something with another person (or with an animal or a machine): his knowledge, his decisions, his sentiments. It succeeds only when it result in a common something, such as an item of information or knowledge that two parties share.

When there is ambiguity in the communication of knowledge, all that is in common are the words that one persons speaks or writes and another hears or reads. So long as ambiguity persists, there is no meaning in common between writer and reader. For the communication to be successfully completed, therefore, it is necessary for the two parties to use the same words with the same meaning----in short, to come to terms. When that happens, communication happens, the miracle of two minds with but a single thought.

A term can be defined as an unambiguous word. That is not quite accurate, for strictly there are no unambiguous words. What we should have said is that a term is a word used unambiguously. The dictionary is full of words. They are almost all ambiguous in the sense that they have many meanings. But a word that has several meanings can be used in one sense at a time. When writer and reader somehow manage for a time to use a given word with one and only one meaning, then, during that time of unambiguous usage, they have come to terms.

You cannot find terms in dictionaries, though the materials for making them are there. Terms occur only in the process of communication. They occur when the writer tries to avoid ambiguity and a reader helps him by trying to follow his use of words.

Term vs Word
 

Most of us do not give much thought to the difference between term and word and use them interchangeably. However, a word is a meaningful element in a language. A term, on the other hand, is a word but has a particular meaning in a situation. Hence, these two cannot be used interchangeably. The relationship between a word and a term can simply be understood in the following manner. All terms are words, but not all words are terms. This highlights that words have a general meaning, which applies to our day to day understanding. However, a term goes a step further; it acquires a special meaning in a special situation. Through this article let us examine the differences

What is a Word?

A word can be defined as a complete meaningful element of a language. Words are made up of morphemes that are the smallest elements of a language. Unlike morphemes that may or may not be able to stand alone, words can always make sense even in isolation. When a number of words are put together, they create a sentence. However, we must pay attention to the grammatical rules that apply to language when creating sentences.

Words can be spoken or else written. These always carry a meaning that is understood by the majority, making the meaning almost universal to the speaker. However, a term does not always carry the same meaning. Most terms are also words. This can be a single word or else a combination of words. When we say culture, value, crime, girl, animal, all these words have a universal meaning to the reader. However, a term does not have this characteristic. It has a special meaning in a specific context

What is a Term?

A term can simply be understood as a word. All terms are words, but not all words are terms. A term is a particular definition of a word, which is applicable to a special situation. For example, in disciplines such as sociology, psychology, biology, geography, there are terms that convey a unique meaning to the user. A term can be used to express an idea, an abstract thought, an object, a concept, etc. A term always represents something.

The special feature of a term is that even though it may have a general meaning in our day to day life, it is different from the meaning with which it is associated in a particular discipline. For example, let us take the very idea of a word.

Most of us consider a word as something that is used to represent something else such as a chair or a book. However, a linguistic may have a completely different definition for a word. He may consider it as the smallest meaningful element of a language. A sociolinguistic may define it as the relationship between the signifier and the signified. This highlights that a term and a word are very different from one another.

 

Rule 5 FIND THE IMPORTANT WORDS AND THROUGH THEM COME TO TERMS WITH THE AUTHOR Note that the rule has two parts/ The first part is to locate the important words, the words that make a difference. The second part is to determine the meaning of these words, as usual with precision.

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 [Given the fact that, among other aspects. a word has many properties in terms of meaning and syntactic behaviour, there is the question of HOW WELL  do the learners know them. Instead of quantity of words learners know, this study looks at the quality of learners' knowledge of the word.

Vocabulary teaching be aimed at raising awareness of word potential so that its properties can be fully exploited.

A key element of successful native-like performance in a foreign language is mastery of lexical relation - collocations, lexical phrases, fixed phrases.

Knowing a word involves

Knowing the degree of probability of when and where to encounter a given word and the sorts of words to be found with it [collocations],

the limitations imposed on it by register [register],

its appropriate syntactic behaviour [grammatical properties],

its underlying form and derivations [morphological behaviours],

the network of associations it has [associative meanings],

its semantic features, its extended or metaphorical meanings [senses],

and so on.

No doubt, some of the translators of the Qur'an whose works are accessible to the Western public can be described as outstanding scholars in the sense of having mastered the Arabic grammar and achieved a considerable knowledge of Arabic literature; but this mastery of grammar and this acquaintance with literature cannot by itself, in the case of a translation from Arabic (and especially the Arabic of the Qur'an), render the translator independent of that intangible communion with the spirit of the language which can be achieved only by living with and in it.

Arabic is a Semitic tongue: in fact, it is the only Semitic tongue which has remained uninterruptedly alive for thousands of years; and it is the only living language which has remained entirely unchanged for the last fourteen centuries. These two factors are extremely relevant to the problem which we are considering. Since every language is a framework of symbols expressing its people's particular sense of life-values and their particular way of conveying their perception of reality, it is obvious that the language of the Arabs - a Semitic language which has remained unchanged for so many centuries - must differ widely from anything to which the Western mind is accustomed. The difference of the Arabic idiom from any European idiom is not merely a matter of its syntactic cast and the mode in which it conveys ideas; nor is it exclusively due to the well-known, extreme flexibility of the Arabic grammar arising from its peculiar system of verbal "roots" and the numerous stem-forms which can be derived from these roots; nor even to the extraordinary richness of the Arabic vocabulary: it is a difference of spirit and life-sense. And since the Arabic of the Qur'an is a language which attained to its full maturity in the Arabia of fourteen centuries ago, it follows that in order to grasp its spirit correctly, one must be able to feel and hear this language as the Arabs felt and heard it at the time when the Qur'an was being revealed, and to understand the meaning which they gave to the linguistic symbols in which it is expressed.

Finding the meanings of Important words

Spotting the important words is only the beginning of the task. It merely locates the places in the text where you have to go to work. There is another part of this fifth rule of reading. Let us turn to that now. Let us suppose you have marked the words that trouble you. What next?

There are two main possibilities. Either the author is using these words in a single sense throughout or he is using them in two or mare senses, shifting his meanings from place to place. In the first alternative, the word stands for a single term. In the second alternative, the word stands for several terms.

In the light of these alternatives, your procedure should be as follows. First, try to determine whether the word has one or many meanings. If it has many, try to see how they are related. Finally, note the places where the word is used in one sense or another, and see if the context gives you  any clue to the reason for the shift in meaning. This last will enable you to follow the word in its change of meanings with the same flexibility that characterizes the author's usage.

How does one find out what the meanings are? The answer is that you have to discover the meanings of all the other words in the context that you do understand. The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider a definition. A definition is stated in words. If you do not understand any of the words used in the definition, you obviously cannot understand the meanings of the word that names the thing defined.

This illustration is typical of the process by which you acquire meanings. You operate with such meanings you already possess. If every word that was used in a definition had itself to be defined, nothing could ever be defined. If every word in a book you were reading was entirely strange to you, as in the case of  a book in a totally foreign language, you could make no progress at all.

But you may ask, does not an author who uses a word in more than a single sense use it ambiguously? And is it not the usual practice for authors to use words in several senses, especially their most important words?

The answer to the first question is No; to the second, Yes. To use a word ambiguously is to use it in several senses without distinguishing or relating their meaning. The author who does that has not made terms that the reader can come to. But the author who distinguishes the several senses in which is is using a critical word and enables the reader to make a responsive discrimination is offering terms.

 

 

[Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is calledpragmatic competence.

]

THEME

 Similarly, a nonfiction book will usually have a concise statement of the main idea in towards the end of the introductory chapter.

Big Question #3: What’s the one most important thing the author wants you to know? This is the main idea. It’s almost as though you could squeeze a whole book down to a single sentence and say that’s what it was all about.

Big Question #1: What makes this book good? I think critics have a responsibility to add value to our experience of a book. And I think they can add more value when, as the old song says, they accentuate the positive.

Big Question #2: What would make this book better? As a critic, it’s important to be honest. And honestly, some parts of some books are pretty bad. Like the impartial umpire behind the plate, you gotta call’em as you see’em when you’re a critic. If you don’t, people won’t trust your opinions and you’ll lose your influence.

Big Question #3: What’s the one most important thing the author wants you to know? This is the main idea. It’s almost as though you could squeeze a whole book down to a single sentence and say that’s what it was all about.

Big Question #4: Why did the writer write this? Why did the author bother to tell this story? What is it about this particular story that the author thought was so important?

Big Question #5: What does the audience need to know to understand and enjoy the book? Sometimes, the critic’s job is to unlock a mystery within a book by supplying an extra piece of information most readers don’t see. This is, in my opinion, what critics do best, and why they are so essential to our appreciation of art and of the world.

Rules of critical reading

Rule 1

The Importance of classifying books:

The first rule of analytical reading can be expressed as follows:

You must know what kind of book you are reading, and you should know this as early in the process as possible, preferably before you begin to read.

Title of a book

Rule 2

The second rule of analytical reading can be expressed as follows: Rule 2.
 

STATE THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE BOOK IN A SINGLE SENTENCE OR AT MOST A FEW SENTENCES.

This means that you must say what the whole book is about as briefly as possible. To find out what a book is about is to discover its theme or main point.

Rule 3
 

The third rule can be expressed as follows: Rule 3.  SET FORTH THE MAJOR PARTS OF THE BOOK, AND SHOW HOW THESE ARE ORGANIZED INTO A WHOLE.

None of the sensible, physical things man knows is simple in the absolute way, it has parts. They are all complex unities. If the parts were not organically related, the whole that they composed would not be one. Strictly speaking, there would be no whole at all but merely a collection.

Like a house, a good book is orderly arrangement of parts. Each major part has a certain amount of independence. It may have an interior structure of its own and it may be decorated in a different way from other parts.

Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book

The second rule directs your attention towards the unity, the third towards the complexity, of a book.