Excerpt from The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, to guide us in our reading:


"Remember that the goal of grammar-stage reading is to know what the author says; the goal of logic-stage inquiry is to understand why and how.

The final stage of reading -- your rhetoric-stage pass through the book -- has a third goal. Now you know what, why and how. The final question is: so what?

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?

Uninformed opinions are easy to come by. But thinking through someone else's argument, agreeing with it for specific well-articulated reasons, or disagreeing with it because you're able to find holes in the writer's argument, or because the writer left out facts which he should have considered and weren't -- that's difficult. The rhetoric stage follows the logic stage for this very reason. The good reader bases his opinion on intelligent analysis, not mere unthinking reaction.

The journal is an excellent logic-stage tool. But in the rhetoric stage of enquiry, you need something more. Rhetoric is the art of clear, persuasive communication, and persuasion always involves two people. In your case, one of these people is the book's author: The book is communicating an idea to you, persuading you of something. But for you to articulate your own ideas clearly back to the book, you need to bring someone else into the process.

How can you do this? In her Letters to Young Ladies, Lydia Sigourney praises the virtues of "purposeful conversation", talk centered around particular ideas. In the nineteenth century, women often met in "weekly societies" to discuss their reading -- the forerunners of today's popular book groups. These discussions, Sigourney suggests, are essential to proper self-education, since they "serve to fix knowledge firmly in the memory".

The problem with book groups (as you know if you've ever been in one) is that the readers who attend them don't always read the book carefully (or at all), and unless someone takes a dictatorial hand during discussion, it's apt to wander off fairly quickly into unrelated chat. For the project of self-education, it's best to find one other person who will agree to read the Great Books list with you and then talk with you about what both of you have read.

This reading partner, indispensable in the final stage of reading, can also be useful to you in the first two. During the grammar and logic stages, your partner provides you with some accountability -- if you've agreed to finish the first reading of a book by a particular deadline and you know someone else will be checking on you, you're much more likely to make good use of your own reading time to actually finish the book.

During your rhetoric-stage inquiry, when you'll be looking back through the book for answers to questions about the writer's ideas, your reading partner can talk to you about those ideas. Perhaps something you found troublesome, or illogical, was entirely clear to your reading partner; discuss the differences, and discover which one of you is correct. You may discover that the disagreement is only an apparent one, brought about by the use of different words for the same concept. Or you may find that an apparent agreement between the two of you dissolves during discussion, perhaps because you are using the same words to represent very different things. A reading partner forces you to use words precisely and define your terms.

Ideally, your reading partner will read at more or less the same speed as you do, and can devote the same hours to the project of reading. But it isn't necessary for you to come from similar backgrounds, educational or otherwise. As a matter of fact, a reading partner with a very different background can help you to think more precisely, as you discover that you need to explain, clearly, ideas that you've always taken for granted."