Objectives

• Understand what you read
• Learn to use a dictionary
• Interpret what you read
• Learn to explicate poetry

Understand What You Read

Prepare to succeed: Before you sit down to read, make sure that you have not only your book, but your class notebook, a pencil or pen, a hardback dictionary, and a subject encyclopedia such as Benet's Readers' Encyclopedia. Anything else on the table might distract you. Remove it.  Whenever possible, read in the library.  The library has two advantages that make it the best place to read. First, unlike just about every other place on campus, it's quiet. If you are going to understand difficult concepts such as photosynthesis and inflation, you need to concentrate, and you simply cannot concentrate when your roommate is talking on the phone and the people next-door are having a '70s dance party.  Second, studying in the library gives you easy access to scores of reference books, including dictionaries and subject encyclopedias, that you can use to look up unfamiliar words, places, and events.  While you usually can't afford the time to look up every word you don't recognize, you can't afford not to look up key terms and names.  If a word or name appears more than once or if it is central to a passage, look it up and summarize what you find in your notes.  For help understanding a dictionary entry, see "Use a Dictionary."

Read "ahead": Read slowly and try to predict where the writer is headed. You won't always be right, of course; if you always knew what was coming, you wouldn't have to read the rest of the chapter. Nevertheless, by thinking ahead in this way, you force yourself to analyze the information as you read it, instead of passively skimming over the words. Also, try to solve sample problems without looking at the answers. For example, a grammar text book might define the passive voice and then present examples of sentences in both the active and passive voice. Read the sentence in the active voice and then try to come up with the passive version. Use the sentence in the book to check your answer.

Take notes: As you read, place a star in the margin of the book next to important passages.  If you are reading literature, for example, you would want to note passages related to the plot, setting, characters, themes, and literary devices. Write a brief comment next to each passage that you star. After you have finished the reading assignment, bring your book and notebook to class. During lectures and group exercises, write in your notebook any names, dates, terms, and ideas that your professor and classmates mention. Pay especially close attention to anything that the professor repeats, writes on the board, or mentions in handouts or study questions. Try to organize this information in a rough outline. For example, if the professor defines the term "sonnet," write this term along the left margin; below the term, move over a half-inch or so and make a list of the characteristics of a sonnet, placing a dash before each characteristic. Place a star next to passages that your professor and classmates note as important. Finally, include an example you can use to illustrate the term. Example:

sonnet 

*-14 lines 

*-iambic pentameter 

*-rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg (English) 

-originated in Italy; English poets adapted it 

-used by Shakespeare, Donne, and others 

-example: Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" 

Organize your notes on a computer: Bring your notes to a computer. Make sure you have a dictionary and, if possible, a subject encyclopedia nearby. Using the outline function in a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word, type the notes from your notebook, as well as key passages you noted in your text book, followed by the numbers of the pages on which they appear. As you input this information, make any necessary changes in organization, add some of your own ideas, and use the dictionary and subject encyclopedia to define important words and terms. If your professor has given you study questions on the material, practice answering--either in your head or in writing--some of these questions by referring to the material in your notes. If you don't have any study questions, simply think about questions someone might ask you about the material and consider ways you might use the information in your outline to answer such questions. Save this outline on a diskette, back it up on a separate diskette, and print a copy that you can place in your notebook. This extra step, while time-consuming, has three benefits. The most important benefit is that it gives you the opportunity to review and synthesize the material you have covered, especially when you take time to reorganize the information and add your own ideas. Typing your notes in an outline also makes them neater and thus easier to read. Finally, storing this information in the form of a computer file allows you to find information very easily. For example, you can use the "find" function in the word-processing software to find a term or a character's name in seconds.

Review your notes: Immediately after you have taken notes on something you have read or heard, take five minutes to review them.  If possible, find or make an opportunity to talk about your notes with someone else. At the very least, come to class prepared to ask questions and talk about your observations. Even better, get together with some classmates from time to time and chat about the material you have been reading. Talking about what you read encourages you to make connections among ideas and to articulate your thoughts. Indeed, I have found that the things I tend to remember best about something I have read are the same ones I discussed in or out of class. Research on learning shows that people tend to remember about 10 percent of what they read, 70 percent of what they discuss, and 95 percent of what they teach. If possible, form a study group in which each member takes turns teaching material to the others.

Use a Dictionary

Become familiar with the format of your dictionary. While some parts of a dictionary entry, such as spelling and definitions, are generally self-explanatory, others require you to know something about how the lexicographers, or dictionary makers, put their information together. For example, you need to be able to decipher the symbols used to indicate the word's pronunciation and make sense of abbreviations such as "tr." and "OE." After you buy a dictionary, take a few minutes to skim the introductory material, which contains valuable information about abbreviations, format for listing entries, system for indicating pronunciation, and much more.

When you are reading, look up unfamiliar words and study their pronunciations, meanings, uses, and histories. I suggest the following steps:

1. Using the pronunciation provided, say the word aloud. Refer to the dictionary's pronunciation key, usually located at the bottom of the page or a facing page, to find out what the symbols mean. If the word has more than one syllable, make sure you know which syllable to stress when you pronounce the word; that is, know which syllable should be pronounced with more force or volume. In the word "volume," for example, the first syllable should be stressed. This step is important because you will want to pronounce the word correctly if you use it in conversation; pronouncing it incorrectly suggests to people listening to you that you do not really know the word. 
2. Determine the word's part of speech. Knowing whether a word is a noun, a verb, or something else can help you to understand and use it. Be aware that many words, such as "run" and "low," can be more than one part of speech. Dictionaries generally use abbreviations such as "n." and "adj." to indicate parts of speech. 
3. Read the definitions and determine which relates to the context in which you found it. You may have to look up words you find in these definitions. Each definition provides one of the word's denotations, or literal meanings, but it may also give you clues to the word's connotations, which are associations that go along with the word. One dictionary's definition of "notorious," for example, is "Known widely and usually unfavorably." Thus, this definition not only explains that "notorious" means "Known widely," but reveals that it has negative connotations. You have reason to believe, then, that the person described in your reading as "notorious" had some enemies. You also know better than to use this word to describe someone widely respected, unless perhaps you want to create a humorous effect. 
4. Pay attention to usage information. When you read a definition, you may notice an italicized term designed to tell how or where the word is used. The designation "Music" in a definition of "note," for example, indicates that this particular definition pertains to how musicians use the word. The designation "archaic" in a definition of "awful" shows that the word is no longer used widely with this meaning. The American Heritage College Dictionary also includes "usage notes" with many words, including "infer," "unique," and "literally." These notes provide information about how appropriate these words are in Standard English. Usage information can help you make decisions about whether and how to use a word. If it is labeled "archaic" or "obscene," for example, you probably will not want to use it in a research paper you are writing for a class, unless it appears in a quotation. 
5. Study the word's etymology. The etymology of a word is its history. In many cases, when you read a word's etymology, you will see that English speakers borrowed the word from another language, such as French or Latin. You also may see that the word consists of various parts, each with its own meaning. If you look up the word "ambiguous," for example, you will see that it came from the Latin language and that it is made up of two parts: "ambi," which means "both" in Latin," and "guous," which refers to "meaning." Such information can help you to remember the word's meaning and to learn new words. By associating this word with "ambivalent," which means "having mixed feelings," and "ambidextrous," which means "functional with both hands," you can learn three words for the price of one. 
6. Drawing on what you have learned from the dictionary entry, use the word in a sentence of your own. Using a word is the best way to commit its meaning to memory. 

Record all of this information in a glossary in your notes. Writing down all of this information not only helps you remember it, but provides you with a reference you can use later.

Interpret What You Read

Read with a purpose:  Baseball star Yogi Berra once said: "If you don't know where you're going, you probably won't get there."  Before you start to read a novel, a chapter in a political science text book, or anything else, determine what you want to take away from it.  If your professor provides study guides, read them before you read the assignment.  If the book comes with its own study questions, read them.  Ask the professor what he or she wants you to get out of the reading.  It also is useful to evaluate the author's own purpose, as well as the audience for the text.  In other words, try to determine the author's background, the author's reasons for writing, and the people the author wishes to reach.  Once you have an idea of why you are reading, you will be better prepared to interpret the text.

Have confidence: If you approach challenging reading material, especially literature, like a riddle, you're likely to be disappointed when you don't "get" it.  Instead, begin every reading assignment with the knowledge that you can find something meaningful and rewarding in it.  The truth is that great works of literature, like people and history, do not give us clues, but suggestions. In fact, one might argue that what makes works great is their richness--that is, their capacity for leading readers down a multitude of mental paths, some of which perhaps the authors themselves didn't consciously plan. When I read, I wander down some of these paths, taking my cues from an author's suggestive images, allusions, symbols, sound patterns, or other characteristics, and I make notes about these elements to support my interpretations. I find this style of reading more rewarding--and more enjoyable--than hunting for clues to a riddle.

Pay attention to form: When you reading to understand material, you tend to focus on content.  In other words, you try to determine what the writer is saying on the surface.  To interpret an essay or novel successfully, however, you often need to pay attention to form.  That is, examine the diction, the genre, any figurative language you encounter, and anything else related not to the words themselves, but to the way they are packaged.  Always ask yourself how the form shapes the meaning of the material.  For example, if a character in a play compares his love to a "light"--thus using a formal element called "figurative language"--speculate on the significance of this analogy.  Why did the character compare his love to a light, rather than, say, a flower or a season?  Literature and other forms of writing often convey important meaning not through just the words themselves, but also through associations with those words.  We tend to associate light with truth, hope, purity, even God; thus, a writer or character who conjures up the notion of light--either through a simile, imagery, symbolism, or lighting effects in a play--is encouraging us to read between the lines and interpret this element.  In short, think of a novel, a poem, even a political speech or television commercial, as an equation in which form + content = meaning. 

Get help: I don't encourage students to use Cliffs Notes and similar "study guides" because I think they discourage students from doing their own reading and interpretation; however, I do suggest reading prefaces, introductions, and critical essays, which can help illuminate challenging texts without "translating" them.  Just remember to give credit to these materials whenever you borrow the ideas you find in them.  Failing to give credit is a form of plagiarism.  Also, use your professor as a resource, both by participating actively in class discussions and by talking to him or her outside class.
 

How to Explicate Poetry

When you read a poem, you should begin by trying to figure what the poet is saying on the surface: the content of the poem. When you can summarize this content in a few sentences, examine the way the poet conveys this content; in other words, analyze the poem's form. Finally, determine how the content and form work together to create the poem's meaning. Think of a poem as an equation: form + content = meaning. The term for analyzing a poem in this way is "explication." Here is a step-by-step method you might find useful when you explicate, or interpret, a poem:

1. Take a deep breath and relax. Read the poem once slowly aloud without writing or marking anything. Don't stop until you finish the poem, even if you don't know the meaning or pronunciation of a word. When you have finished, reflect for a moment on any words, images, and characters that caught your attention. Jot down these items in your notebook, along with one sentence in which you try to summarize the poem.
2. Now read the poem again silently. When you come to a word you don't know, look it up in the dictionary. In your notes, write the word, its pronunciation, the meaning or meanings of it in this poem, and a clue to help you remember it. Often information in the word's etymology, or history, will give you a clue to remembering it. Write a synonym for the word right above it in your text book. When you come to a proper noun, such as the name of a person or event, look it up in the literary reference work and record key details in your notebook, just as you did when you looked up unfamiliar words. Concentrate on learning these words and allusions because many of them will appear again and again in literature, and you want to be ready for them next time.
3. Rephrase sentences you don't understand. Almost every poem you will find in your text books is made up of complete sentences with subjects and verbs and, in many cases, objects, prepositional phrases, subordinate clauses, and other syntactical elements. Even if you don't know what a prepositional phrase or appositive is, you know how to read and understand them. In fact, you do it all the time when you read ordinary sentences in newspapers, magazines, and text books. The problem is that most poets don't write the way reporters and text book authors do. Even though they write complete sentences, they change the order of words--placing, for example, the object, the thing receiving the action, before the verb instead after it, where we ordinarily put it in speech and prose. This change in word order is called an "inversion," and it is common in poetry, especially poetry written before 1900. In the following passage, which comes from John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising," the word "season" is an object of the verb, even though it comes before the verb: "Love, all alike, no season knows." We would say: "Love, all alike, knows no season." Rephrasing sentences so that they sound more like speech or at least prose will help you figure what the poet is saying.
4. Identify the literal meaning of figurative language. The other practice that distinguishes poets from writers of nonliterary prose is their heavy use of metaphors, personification, symbols, hyperboles, apostrophes, and many other forms of figurative language. Figurative language does not mean exactly what it says; rather, it suggests meanings. In the phrase quoted above, Donne does not literally mean that love is unfamiliar with spring, summer, fall, and winter. As a thing, love cannot know anything at all; only people can know something--that is, be conscious of it. Thus, Donne is personifying love, giving it human qualities. The figurative language in poetry helps us to understand new or complex concepts. Thinking of love as a person who treats all seasons in the same way helps us to appreciate the universality of love. Once you have completed the steps above, you may not understand every word or even every sentence, but you should have a fairly good idea of the poet's overall message, or the content of the poem. Now you are ready to begin interpreting and analyzing it.
5. Analyze the poet's use of language. You already have looked closely at the poet's use of language as you were trying to understand the poem's content. Now you want to ask yourself what this use of language--the inversions, symbols, and so on--contribute to the poem's meaning. Why, for example, did the poet choose to compare his love to a "red, red rose" instead of tree or a bird? One trick that will help you in this step is thinking about associations:we tend to associate roses with beauty, tenderness, passion, and love, but we also know that a rose bush has thorns that can be painful. Not all of these associations may be appropriate for a particular poem, but many of them probably will. Make a note of these associations in your notebook and jot down some ideas about what they contribute to the poem's meaning.
6. Scan the poem. Scanning poetry is different from skimming it. To scan a poem means to identify the rhythm, which in English poetry comes from the alteration of stressed and unstressed syllables.
1. Begin by looking at the polysyllabic words--the words of more than one syllable. Say each word aloud and try to determine which syllable you stress. If you are unsure, look up the word in the dictionary, where you will see an accent mark either before or after the stressed syllable. In The American Heritage College Dictioanry, for example, the accent appears before the stressed syllable. If you are using another dictionary, look up "pronunciation" in the dictionary's guide to reading entries. In your text book, place an accent mark (/) over each stressed syllable and a horizontal line over the unstressed syllables (-).
2. Now look for all the one-syllable structure words--words that have little or no meaning, but rather serve to connect other words and show their relationships. Structure words include articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, or, but), prepositions (of, in, on, to, etc.), and auxiliaries (have, may, do, will, etc.). Mark these words as unstressed.
3. Mark one-syllable nouns and verbs as stressed.
4. Read the poem aloud, using your marks as a guide to which syllables to stress. Look for one of the following patterns: iambic (- /), trochaic (/ -), anapestic (- - /), and dactyllic (/ - -). Most English poetry that has a regular rhythm is iambic. If you don't see one of these patterns, try to change a few of the marks on the one-syllable words. If you see a pattern now, write the name of the rhythm in your notebook. You probably still will notice a few anomalies, places where the rhythm changes from the regular pattern, but ignore these anomalies for now. If you still don't see a pattern, count the number of stressed syllables in three consecutive lines. If these lines do not have the same number of stressed syllables, the poem probably does not have a regular rhythm; in other words, it probably is written in free verse.
5. Draw vertical lines around each instance of a pattern. Each one of these units is called a "metrical foot" or simply a "foot." For example, if the line you scanned has the markings - / - / - / - / - /, you would recognize the iambic pattern and mark the line this way: - / | - / | - / | - / | - /. Count the number of units in each line. In most cases, this number will be the same for every line of the poem. In the previous example, you would count five units, or five feet. Use the following terms to identify the number of feet in the lines: dimeter (2 feet), trimeter (3 feet), tetrameter (4 feet), pentameter (5 feet), and hexameter (6 feet). You now have identified the overall pattern of rhythm in the poem. In our example, the rhythm is iambic pentameter.
6. Now look back at the anomalies, the places where the rhythm changes. A unit with two stresses is called a spondee, and a unit with two unstressed syllables is called a pyrrhic foot. Try to determine what role these anomalies play. For example, many times spondees call attention to important words, images, or ideas. Jot down your ideas in your notebook.
7. Look for rhyme. Look at the final words in the first and second lines. Do they rhyme with each other or any other final words? If so, the poem probably has a rhyme scheme, a pattern of rhyme. To label the rhyme scheme, place the letter "a" at the end of the first line. If the final word in the next line rhymes with this word, label it "a" also; otherwise, label it "b." Continue this process, identifying rhyming words with the same letter. Now look at the words that rhyme. Are they similar in meaning, or are they contrasting words? In your notebook, note any places where the rhyme is significant and suggest a way this rhyme contributes to the poem's meaning.
8. Finally, read the poem one more time aloud. Practice using pauses and stress to make the poem's meaning come alive in your recitation. In your notebook, make any final comments on the way the poem's content and form work together to create meaning.

Terms

• hardback dictionary 
• denotation 
• connotation 
• etymology 
• explication 
• scansion 
• stress 
• subject encyclopedia