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Coming to Terms with an Author
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It has been completed the first part of analytical reading when the reader is capable to apply the fourth rules described previously. Also that this rules can be useful to the reader to at the end of the book describe what is the book about and the structure of the book.


The author mention that when we complete this rules we are ready to advance to the next stage which also have rules of readings the fist one is called: Coming to terms.


”For a term is the basic element of communicable knowledge.”
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Words vs. Terms


Term is not a word—at least, not just a word without further qualifications.
What we should have said is that a term is a word used unambiguously.


“When writer and reader somehow manage for a time to use a given word with one and only one meaning, then, during that time of unambiguous usage, they have come to terms.”


The rules that are demonstrated in the next chapter are conformed by two steps:


1) A step dealing with the language as such
2) A step beyond the language to the thought that lies behind it.


The author explains how sometimes the author wants to describe something with a word and we as readers interpret it in another way. He gives us the example of reading.



(1) Reading to be entertained,
(2) Reading to get information
(3) Reading to achieve understanding.


The author could be talking to us about reading to be entertained for example but we can interpret it as reading to get information.


Technical Words and Special Vocabularies


I like the example that Adler Mortimer gives to us with Euclid´s Elements because we are using this book in the Michael Polanyi College. He describe how we cannot read Euclid if at first of his book he doesn’t describes the words that are used next by him in all his propositions. Words as what is a “point,” “line,” “plane,” “angle,” “parallel,” and so forth are really necessary to be familiarized with them to really can comprehend the text.


Euclid helps you here by making his primary propositions explicit at the very beginning. If all the authors do the same as Euclid it could be more easily to understand what the author want to transmit to us.


Is easier to discover the special vocabularies in our readings if we are familiarized with the subject of what we are reading. For example if we are reading something about economy we have to be familiarized with markets, capitalism, money etc.

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Finding the Meanings


Previously the author described us that we have to look for the words that we don’t understand but now we have to look for their meanings to really comprehend what we are reading. He gave us good advice that we can use, that remembers me to my book of literature of school that also gives me the same advice. It is to look to the other words around the word that we don’t understand to try to look the meaning.


“The answer is that you have to discover the meaning of a word you do not understand by using the meanings of all the other words in the context that you do understand”