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Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

andreasfragner.com

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Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#111

Post by grugagag »

jrm4 wrote: post #104

I can't speak for others, but for me this headline and idea is exactly and perfectly wrong, so I suppose I just want to reach those for whom this generates unnecessary "guilt" or something like that. As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore. I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "surviva…

I generally disagree with any assertion on what’s more important on such a wide array of variation, for who and when. Sure, it could be important for some things and irrelevant for others things at the same time.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#112

Post by jonsen »

bikenaga wrote: post #81
travisporter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline

I was using Post-Its to mark pages and add comments, but I stopped after reading some warnings about the glue damaging pages: https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/post-it-or-not-post-it http://libraries.ucsd.edu/preservation/postits.html It's not clear from these articles how soon damage becomes apparent; I haven't noticed any yet in books which had Post-Its. It may not matter if you don't intend your books to have archiva…

Second link of yours doesn't work for me.

I have at least a few Post-it notes in every book. Some sitting there for thirty years or more. Never experienced any problem. Always used the real Post-it from 3M.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#113

Post by aeturnum »

jrm4 wrote: post #104

I can't speak for others, but for me this headline and idea is exactly and perfectly wrong, so I suppose I just want to reach those for whom this generates unnecessary "guilt" or something like that. As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore. I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "surviva…

It's a classic begging the question fallacy. Summary is absolutely a way to maximize certain outcomes of reading, but not all outcomes! Which outcomes to value is a question we can all reflect on.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#114

Post by kashunstva »

jrm4 wrote: post #104

I can't speak for others, but for me this headline and idea is exactly and perfectly wrong, so I suppose I just want to reach those for whom this generates unnecessary "guilt" or something like that. As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore. I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "surviva…

> I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight.

The good thing is that it’s not an either/or proposition. I often read a book straight-through then decide it will be useful enough to me in the future that there are elements I want to retain, in which case I’ll engage in a second cursory extraction process. Often I just don’t know in advance whether I will feel that way at the outset.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#116

Post by kashunstva »

einpoklum wrote: post #102
TheFreim wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may help to look at it this way: A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.

Your insistence on this kind of 'consumptive' and 'territory-marking' ownership of books is kind of silly IMHO. I mean, suppose you have a 100 books. You're not reading more than 2 or 3 of them at once, if that; and it's not like you're doing anything with the rest other than keeping them on a shelf. Now, Once you either have a family, or have friends with similar interests, or with kinds of similar interests etc - t…

> And when you get older, you will pass on your entire library, at some point, or sell it off, or bequeath it etc. At any of these points, you want the book to be free of your personal jots and notes

While I generally have a communitarian orientation, I predict that as I approach this point, other end-of-life matters will occupy my headspace to a greater degree than any psychic rumblings about the odd marginalia in my dusty collection.

As an aside (because for the mere mortals among us it doesn’t apply) occasionally some historical inferences are made based on the reader’s margin notations.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#117

Post by tsimionescu »

pessimizer wrote: post #46
jameshart wrote: post #14

Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there pre…

I find that most of the things I read can be pretty effectively summarized in a single thesis sentence and a few additional sentences to generally describe how that thesis was supported. If you're only reading things that can't even be summarized in an abstract, you must be reading a lot of unopinionated biographies?

The vast majority of literature has much of its value in the way it is told, not just in the story it is telling. You can summarize Hamlet in a sentence or two, but that's not the reason it is still being read and performed 400+ years later.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#118

Post by TheFreim »

bigtunacan wrote: post #84
TheFreim wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may help to look at it this way: A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.

Or it is owned by the library

Good point, though I will say that I've checked out a lot of library books that have had useful markings people have put in them, though I wouldn't personally mark something that isn't my own property that way.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#119

Post by esafak »

taeric wrote: post #53
jameshart wrote: post #14

Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there pre…

Summarizing is not the same as condensing. Just jotting down your view helps you. Such that you don't even have to worry about making your version for an audience.

Summarizing is condensing. I think you are thinking of paraphrasing.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#120

Post by tsimionescu »

chubot wrote: post #47

I totally agree, and surprised it's a bit controversial here. I understand that reading for pleasure can be different than reading for comprehension But I lean towards reading for comprehension. I have a wiki which includes all the books I've read. The good ones get their own wiki pages with the main things I learned, and other notes. A key point is that I don't take notes while I read. I only do it LATER -- because…

I'm guessing a large part of the controversy is related to the fact that reading has many different aspects. Possibly the article is referring to the same kind of reading you're referring to - technical books on various real-world topics.

However, it's much harder to see the value in doing anything like the article is suggesting for literature. Is there really much to gain from writing a summary of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, or of a book of poetry? Is that even the right way to engage with the material?

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