{"id":9175,"date":"2016-09-08T20:30:33","date_gmt":"2016-09-09T03:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=9175"},"modified":"2016-09-08T20:30:33","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T03:30:33","slug":"when-cliff-notes-arent-enough-write-your-own-or-how-to-read-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/when-cliff-notes-arent-enough-write-your-own-or-how-to-read-a-book\/","title":{"rendered":"When Cliff Notes aren’t enough….write your own? or How to Read a Book"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Look

Look Familiar?<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was in high school and college in the late 80’s and early 90’s Cliff’s Notes<\/em> (then with the apostrophe) were a sort of a taboo in the schools I attended. \u00a0[Cliff’s Notes, if you aren’t familiar are ‘study guides’ designed to help you pass a class\/assignment without having read the text. In the USA, at least, they were the original, although Spark Notes are more popular now. \u00a0I have been told ‘Letts Notes’ are the British equivalent] Everyone knew about them, most people never admitted to using them but occasionally some brazen student would flaunt the booklet as a sort of bright yellow and black badge of defiance and rebellion. \u00a0This was usually accomplished by casually – or trying really hard to look casual – carrying the booklet in-between a few books and carry it to class.<\/p>\n

I would love to say that I never used Cliff’s Notes\u00a0<\/em>as some moral stance as a nod to intellectual curiosity and academic integrity\u00a0, but the truth is, I just never saw the upside. \u00a0Enough people were using them that I always thought it would be more work and take more time to make my work original using the same cheat sheet than it would be to just do the actual reading.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t thought about Cliffs Notes in a long time, but they were the first thing that came to my mind when I began reading\u00a0‘How to Read a Book’ by\u00a0Mortimer\u00a0Adler & Charles Van Doren<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the first chapter Adler says, ‘There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding’ (p.3). \u00a0Cliffs Notes and the like are a fairly useful, if morally\/academically questionable, way to gain facts about a particular piece of literature, but they are woefully inadequate as a means of gaining real, deep understanding about the purpose or meaning of a book. \u00a0Or, to put it differently, the purpose of this book is to help the reader develop skills in ‘the art of reading’, skills and operations that, when properly used by the reader allow the mind to pass ‘from understanding less to understanding more.’ (p.8)<\/p>\n

So, then, the goal of this book and the type of reading it illustrates is not to produce, upon completion a reader who can necessarily recite lots of but rather a reader who has wrestled with what the author’s message is, the unity of the book and gained some level of understanding about these things and the subject matter at hand. \u00a0This is not the kind of thing that can be gleaned simply by working through a Cliffs Notes booklet.<\/p>\n

As I read through the book and found reinforcement for several techniques and practices I have developed as well as (hopefully) learned a few new tricks, I was struck by the rather ironic idea that Cliff – or whoever writes his notes for him – probably had to employ many of the techniques and practices that Adler espouses to be able to produce the work that allows so many to move through their education without learning to get to the fourth – Syntopical – level of reading.<\/p>\n

So, beyond the practical types, operations and techniques my biggest takeaway from this introductory text is this:\u00a0The work of reading – and of gaining some knowledge from that reading – is just that: work….. it is an ongoing process that has to be undertaken alone \u00a0– don’t take this literally, there is great value in working through this together, but the value is only available to you if you do the work yourself and or participate in it.<\/p>\n

This means that you can’t really take a shortcut – knowing what the cliffnotes tells you isn’t really the same as reading the book. And really, we all know this already, but the temptation to take the shortcut is there just the same. \u00a0And the truth is, that sometimes maybe all we need are the Cliff Notes, but other times we need to do the work to write those notes ourselves and the key is to be able to know which is which or, as the title goes, knowing how to read a book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was in high school and college in the late 80’s and early 90’s Cliff’s Notes (then with the apostrophe) were a sort of a taboo in the schools I attended. \u00a0[Cliff’s Notes, if you aren’t familiar are ‘study guides’ designed to help you pass a class\/assignment without having read the text. In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[660],"class_list":["post-9175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-adler","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}