This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you struggle when you’re tasked with reading a textbook? Are there ways to better understand the content matter?
In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler breaks down the best ways to read math, science, philosophy, and social science books. Adler gives advice and provides you with questions to increase your understanding.
Continue reading if you want to know how to read a textbook better.
Reading Approaches for Different Genres
This section from How to Read a Book treats different genres and guides on how to adjust the four key questions:
- What is this book about as a whole?
- What is being said in detail, and how?
- Is the book true, in whole or part?
- What of it? Why is this important? What follows?
This is Mortimer Adler’s guide on how to read a textbook about math, science, philosophy, or social sciences.
Reading Math Textbooks
Historical math and science works tend to be more accessible than people think because 1) historically, they were written for broad readership; 2) they tend to clarify upfront their terms and propositions.
Modern works tend to be written by experts for experts for reasons of expediency, since fields have become deeply specialized. Thus they contain jargon and require prior training. The techniques in this book don’t apply as well in these cases.
When reading math, remember that math is a language like any other, with its own conventions and grammar. It is in fact easier to understand than most languages, since it is not spoken and there are no emotional connotations. Treat it like this and it will become less inscrutable.
Science Books
When reading science, the goal is not just to absorb the scientific laws and hypotheses, but more broadly to understand the history and philosophy of science. The scientific problem is to describe the phenomena as accurately as possible, and to interconnect different kinds of phenomena.
The Four Questions:
- What is this book about as a whole?
- State as clearly as you can the problem the author has tried to solve.
- What is being said in detail, and how?
- What experimental data are required to believe the arguments? They are likely outside the realm of your experience.
- What assumptions are required to form the propositions?
- Is the book true, in whole or part?
- What of it? Why is this important? What follows?
- Theoretical conclusions can have important practical consequences (eg on climate change).
Philosophy Books
Philosophical works discuss the kinds of questions that children ask – broadly:
- Theoretical/speculative: what is or what happens
- Metaphysics: about being or existence
- Nature: about becoming and changes
- Epistemology: about knowledge, its causes and limits
- Practical/normative: what should be done
- Ethics: right vs wrong
- Politics: good society and the individual in relation to the community
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- How to be a better critic of what you read
- Why you should read a novel differently from a nonfiction book
- How to understand the crux of a book in just 15 minutes
