Analytical Reading

Analytical Reading is the third of the four levels of reading laid out in How To Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, sitting above Elementary Reading and Inspectional Reading and below Syntopical Reading. The book defines it as “thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading — the best reading you can do,” and frames the trade-off against inspectional reading by time: “If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.” Adler borrows Francis Bacon’s metaphor — “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested” — to say that “reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it.”

The levels build on one another. Inspectional reading’s “superficial reading” stage “serves the reader when he comes to the second stage of reading at the analytical level,” making systematic skimming a prerequisite. Adler ties the skill to education, arguing that “a good liberal arts high school, if it does nothing else, ought to produce graduates who are competent analytical readers” (while a good college should produce syntopical readers).

Context: How to Read a Book (1940, revised 1972) is Adler and Van Doren’s classic guide to active reading. Its four-level scheme — elementary, inspectional, analytical, syntopical — is the framework most associated with the book.

Where this appears

• How To Read a Book — the third of the book’s four reading levels, defined as the most thorough reading possible given unlimited time