“Studies in educational psychology show that annotating a text dramatically improves your retention of its contents,” the essay noted. “In some cases, readers who engage actively with what they read by marking a book remember up to seven times more than those who don’t.” Part of the magic here is in mentally reprocessing and playing with the ideas the author presents, engaging in the “elaborative encoding” that helps the brain transfer knowledge into long-term memory. The Culturist features a picture of a page spread from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, with Francis Ford Coppola’s marginal scribbles and arrows pointing to underlined passages.
“The margins of a text provide the real-world, physical space where you stop consuming ideas and start working with them,” the essay says. “In other words, the margins are where reading becomes thinking.”
The Culturist draws heavily from “How to Mark a Book,” an essay by the educator and author Mortimer J. Adler, which appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1941 — worth reading in its own right.
“Confusion about what it means to ‘own’ a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type — a respect for the physical thing — the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author,” Adler writes. “A book is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music.” It has to be engaged and played with. Those people who have first editions lined up on shelves, dust jackets wrapped in protective plastic covers, merely own “woodpulp and ink,” Adler says; to truly own books, they have to be dog-eared and “marked and scribbled in from front to back.”
“The reason why a great conductor makes notations on his musical scores — marks them up again and again each time he returns to study them — is the reason why you should mark your books. If your respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the way, buy yourself a cheap edition and pay your respects to the author.”
I’ll admit that for many years, I was that first variety of book owner. My shelves are still stuffed with unread collector’s editions and pampered antique first printings. But I have come to see books less as objects to cherish and more as tools — even among the editions I might have handled daintily in the past. Particularly as I became an author myself, I came to appreciate what other authors had intended for me to uncover in their books: extended argument with subtle references to other works and other modes of thinking. Some of those elements come to the surface when a reader brings his or her own perspective to the text. So now I always read books with a pencil in hand, putting notes and drawings in the margins that highlight how I am processing the author’s unfurling arguments. As Adler points out, this has made me a slower but more deliberate reader: It’s not just about content intake.
“That is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author,” writes Adler. “Don’t let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn’t consist in being an empty receptacle.” In fact, innovation comes from the interactions between thinkers from different disciplines and perspectives — and for me, new ideas pop off the page when I start writing in the text, reacting to the text.
In marginalia, you’re making arguments with the author. “Making arguments is the name of the game in academia” — something I once underlined amid a mess of margin notes in Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. Echoing Adler, Graff also says that “academic intellectual culture is a conversation rather than a mere inventory of texts, facts, ideas, and methods” — another passage underlined, which we ended up quoting in Hacking College.
Clueless in Academe was just one of many books that Ned and I passed back and forth while doing research for Hacking College — we got to know each other through the ideas and notes we left in the margins. In Richard J. Light’s Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds, I found that Ned had underlined a passage where a student realizes that it is “really up to me to take charge” of a college education. Ned wrote on the side “get vs. given” — which, I now know from writing with him for many years, is a reference to Ned’s notion that you have to “get” your college education, not passively receive it, as many do in high school. The decline in long-form reading and reading for pleasure among young people — along with the rise of electronic media — has me wondering if marginalia is a dying form of communicating thought.
For me and Ned, at least, our interactions continue. At one point in More Than Words, Warner describes asking AI to produce a column in his own writing style, and gives the bot thorough instructions to write about a book chronicling the rise of the film critics Siskel and Ebert. In the margins, I made remarks about the cheesy essay ChatGPT spits out, but Ned had commented on Warner’s prompt: “Look at the detail here,” he wrote. Then, in a section where Warner dissects the bot’s schmaltzy writing, Ned added: “But note, he can ‘see’ this. What would an average reader need to be able ‘to see’?”
That might seem like an enigmatic phrase, but I immediately knew what Ned was getting at: To work with AI, you need substantial knowledge to both write the prompts and evaluate the outputs. (Warner referred to that as a “native practice” in our interview.)
“You may have one final objection to marking books. You can’t lend them to your friends because nobody else can read them without being distracted by your notes,” Adler writes. As co-authors, Ned and I had to get into each other’s heads, but Adler points out another problem of handing out your books: “You won’t want to lend them because a marked copy is kind of an intellectual diary, and lending it is almost like giving your mind away.”
Which reminds me to box up some books today to send back to Chicago.
Speaking of ‘Hacking College’ ...
The Hacking College Learning Community, sponsored by the University of Minnesota, will commence next week, on May 29. The learning community will gather a range of people: college counselors, professors, academic administrators, and so on to discuss the book’s methods for guiding students and conveying the value of higher education. The cut-off date for signing up is May 23.
This learning community is intended to be of use to people who work directly with students, guiding them through college, as well as those who run colleges and are looking for ways to revitalize under-enrolled programs or improve outcomes. We want to spark conversations across different types of institutions — and hope that they continue to collaborate after the learning community ends in July. Ned and I will both participate in the discussions week to week.
We are also organizing a fall tour for Hacking College, speaking to students, parents, and staff and faculty members about a different way to see the college experience. If you’re interested in having us drop by, reach out.
We will be at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Bethesda on May 28 as part of its author series. If you’re in the Baltimore-Washington area, come by and say hello.
Other Things to Read This Week
The Culturist article mentioned above is one of many that Jonathan Boymal unearths and highlights on his LinkedIn feed every week. Boymal, an associate professor of economics at RMIT University, in Australia, ranges far beyond markets. He seems more interested in how knowledge is created through interconnection, how AI will affect the humanities, or what skills mean to learners and job seekers. Check out his posts.
Lizabeth Cohen, a professor of American studies at Harvard University, wrote in to praise our recent column about Baltimore and the Johns Hopkins University, and she included a link to her own article about “eds and meds” in American cities, from The Boston Globe. “As the administration slashes federal funding to hospitals and universities, it is not only undermining important medical research, it is striking at the heart of how American cities have reinvented themselves in the postindustrial era,” Cohen writes.
There has been an explosion of news in the past few weeks related to AI, academic integrity, cognitive offloading, and learning. I will tackle those topics in the near future in The Edge. In the meantime, I’m giving a plug to Learning to Flourish in the Age of AI, by Stephen M. Kosslyn, a psychologist who was a founding dean and provost at Minerva University and a former director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Lastly, in the spirit of marginalia, I’ll highlight a book passage about education I recently underlined in The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking, by Elizabeth Minnich, about how normal people can allow horrible things — be those ethnic cleansings or everyday exploitations — to occur.
“I have worked as an educator on the college and university level for more than a few decades. When I look back on that work and consider its relation to all that I have explored in trying to understand how people can do such things, both good and evil, I find that I have come to believe that education — given the unhappy record of other social, economic, and political institutions, most assuredly including religious ones — is at the very least a crucial strand of the weave of efforts we are morally required to explore if we are ever to make Never again anything other than a tragically failed cry of the heart. To ask, What were they thinking? Were they thinking? seems to me evidently to lead to questions about how they, and we, and the future in its generations have been and will be educated.”
