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The Well-Educated Mind"

Steps to Reading

1. Schedule time for self-education
   • Morning is better than evening
   • Start with what you are used to
   • 4 days per week
   • Don’t check email too much
   • Stay disciplined and focused during self-education
     • Self-education helps train us to prioritize important things inlife
   • Start now ;)
     • 1/2 hour sessions 4/week
2. Improve Your Mechanics
   • Practice phonical reading? huh
   • To improve vocabulary:
     • Wordly Wise 3000 is a set of books to help learn new words
     • Vocabulary from Classical Roots is for after reading ^
       • For classical literature
   • Regressing is okay as long as it is intentional to connect previous ideas
3. Take notes when reading, then summarize the book
   • Jot down any ideas, quotes, or sentences that resonate within you
   • Summaries should focus on the main ideas of the chapter, and should be brief
   • Spend time reacting to the summaries you wrote, and the ideas that come from them

1 - Training Your Own Mind

• Having a friend to discuss books with helps tremendously with further understanding the concepts and arguments of the book, resulting in true internalization
• Start asking questions when reading books Steps to reading a book:

1. Understanding the ideas (grammar)
2. Evaluating the ideas and their arguments/flaws (logic)
3. Implementing it into one’s own life (rhetoric) When reading about a certain topic:

• Start with the books early published to act as a foundation for more modern ideas

2 - The Act of Reading

• Being informed is to collect facts, while being enlightened is to understand an idea through the facts you collected The speed of reading a book is dependent on:
• The abstractness of words
  • Some words are crucial to a sentence and should not be overlooked
• The amount of ideas
  • Speedreading is most effective with objective information that doesn’t require much thinking
• The familiarity of the ideas
  • Reading about a hobby vs reading about a historical event

3 - Journalling

Types of journalling include: Personal journalling

• Travel journalling
• Dream journalling
• Creative journalling (idea brainstorming)
• Mind-body journalling Self-Education Journalling
• Remembering quotes, snippets, ideas from books
• Write a summary about the book
• Then, evaluated through personal reflection and thought (questions, reactions, thoughts)
  • Taking notes HELPS with this as you have to organize it with your own already-existing ideas
    • HOly shti im akmalkmaskldmaslkdmasklmd

4 - Starting to Read

Note-taking and Summarizing

1. It’s okay to not fully understand all the ideas as you read a book
   • Just keep reading and come back when prepared
2. Take notes, graze through toc and headings
   • Prefaces can be read after the book
   • Taking notes when reading for the first time can be rather excessive
     • It’s our first time grasping such ideas, so we’re prone to record more things
       • When we better understand the information, we’ll need less notes to refresh our minds of the ideas
       • Maybe even only write 1-2 sentences LMAO
         • I kinda wanna keep writing the different lists in books though, as they are already compressed and are good reminders
           • Holy am I taking a lot of personal notes for this book, already applying the stuff I read lmao
3. Have a personal page for notes
   • Should probably start doing this again
4. After reading, create a TOC
   • Give it a title, and a subtitle that describes the main subject in your own words

Processing

The processing process helps us combine the book’s thoughts with our own

1. Reread
   • The ideas you had trouble understanding
   • The main ideas of your notes
   • The summaries
2. Consider the structure of the book
   • What was the purpose of the structure? Could it have been more fluid?
3. Purpose of the book
   • Why did the author create the book? How did it personally impact you?
4. Were they effective in their goal?
   • What parts were convincing, what parts weren’t blah blah blah

Reflection

• What does this writer want me to do?
• What does this writer want me to believe?
• What does this writer want me to experience?
• Am I convinced that I must do, or believe, what the writer wants me to do or believe?
• Have I experienced what the writer wants me to experience?
  • If not, why?

Conversation

• Talk to someone about the ideas of the book
• Background doesn’t matter as long as they can commit the same time as you for reading

Evaluation

• The importance of answering questions isn’t to get the answer right, but rather to think about the prevalent ideas

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