How did Newman define the word "Catholic"? What did this definition have to do with his view of education?
What did Newman see as the difference between "useful knowledge" and "liberal knowledge"?
After you have answered these four questions, read and summarize the passage again, then compare your second summary to your first one. How has learning key information about the author and text changed your ability to make sense of what you read?
ANNOTATING
After prereading to gather information about a text, your next step is to read the text closely. Your two most important tools will be a good dictionary and a pencil or a pen.
Reading with a dictionary at hand is extremely important, as it allows you to look up words that you do not know. This practice may sound obvious, but many people instead try to figure out the meanings of difficult words by their contexts. Sometimes, this strategy works; sometimes, it does not. If you do not understand a key term that an author uses, you are much less likely to understand the arguments in which the term is used. When you come across a word you don't know, you will want to check a good dictionary.
Your other important close reading tool is a pencil or a pen. As an active reader, you should write while you read. Taking notes on a computer or on a separate piece of paper is a good practice when reading a library book or one borrowed from someone else. Within your own book, annotate the text as you read by underlining key passages, writing comments in the margins, and recording insights as they come to you. Studies have shown that even if you never look again at the annotations that you make, the act of making them will increase the amount of information that you will recall in the future.
As you gain experience with active reading, you will discover annotation tricks and strategies that work for you. Different people annotate texts in different ways, depending on their learning styles and methods of recalling information. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you annotate difficult and unfamiliar texts:
Underline key points and any thesis statement
Whenever you encounter a single statement or part of a paragraph that summarizes one of the author's major arguments, underline it and write something in the margin that tells you that this is a key point. Once you determine that a certain statement summarizes a key part of the argument, you can use this statement as a reference point to see how that argument is supported. (For more on thesis statements, see p. 634.)
Note your insights
As you read an explanation of a difficult idea, a certain part of your brain tries to forge connections between what you are reading and what you already know. This process can produce important insights while you are reading. However, if you do not record these insights, you may very well forget them. Just the act of writing them in the margin helps to make them part of your long-term memory.
Respond to the author
Reading is always part of a dialogue with an author, and marginal notations are a good place to carry on that dialogue. If you strongly agree or disagree with something that you read, make a note of it. These notes will serve you well when it is time to develop your opinions in the form of an essay or in-class writing assignment.
Avoid the temptation to underline or comment too much
Like any good thing, annotating can be overdone. This overkill often defeats the purpose of annotating—if everything is underlined it becomes impossible to distinguish what is important.
Here, using the same passage from "Knowledge Its Own End" that we used in the section on prereading, is an example of a moderate use of underlining that combines some of the strategies listed above.
Liberal knowledge = interdisciplinary "useless" knowledge
What is the purpose of education?
Thesis: Acquiring knowledge is good in and of itself
Knowledge is a good thing worth obtaining, even if it does not lead to other good things such as wealth or status
I am asked what is (the end of University Education,) and of the (Liberal) or Philosophical Knowledge which I conceive it to impart: I answer, that what I have already said has been sufficient to show that it has a very tangible, real, and sufficient end, though the end cannot be divided from that knowledge itself. Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward. And if this is true of all knowledge, it is true also of that special Philosophy, which I have made to consist in a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches, of the relations of science to science, of their mutual bearings, and their respective values. What the worth of such an acquirement is, compared with other objects which we seek,—wealth or power or honour or the conveniences and comforts of life, I do not profess here to discuss; but I would maintain, and mean to show, that it is an object, in its own nature so really and undeniably good, as to be the compensation of a great deal of thought in the compassing, and a great deal of trouble in the attaining.
IDENTIFYING PATTERNS
Whenever you write, you use, consciously or unconsciously, some kind of organizational pattern. If you are writing about something that happened to you, your organizational pattern will likely be chronological (this happened, then this, and then this . . . ); if you are describing a place, you will probably use a spatial order; and so on. When you are reading an unfamiliar text, it helps to try to figure out what kind of organizational pattern the author is using. This knowledge will help you anticipate arguments and conclusions and know where to look for them in the body of the text. Most good writing has characteristics of several different patterns, but often one pattern predominates, if not in an entire essay, at least in a particular passage. Here are some of the more common organizational patterns for written prose:
Chronological order
Historical texts, descriptions of events, personal narratives, and travelogues are often organized chronologically. The narrative begins at one point in time, then moves through the period described, with successive points in time forming the major organizational units of the text. Works such as Marevasei Kachere's "War Memoir" (p. 514) generally use a straightforward chronological pattern to present their ideas.
Spatial order
While descriptions of events are often organized chronologically, descriptions of things and places are often organized spatially. Spatial organization can be used to describe everything from the nucleus of an atom to the universe. When prose accompanies pictures, charts, graphs, or other graphic information, the text's content is oriented spatially to the visual information, as is the case in Carl Jung's Red Book (p. 108).
Classification
When an author wants to describe a number of different things—be they kinds of tomatoes, types of clouds, Greek philosophies, or (in the case of what you are reading right now) methods of organizing written information—he or she might create a classification system for the information and then present the information as a list. The list might be set off with bullets, headers, or other formatting information, or it might simply occur normally in the text, with nothing to indicate where the description of one item ends and another begins. For an example of the way that a classification system can organize an essay, consider the various stances toward one's subject matter that Wayne Booth presents in "The Rhetorical Stance" (p. 198).