Deep Reading Pt. 1: The Reading System Nobody Taught You At School

This is by far the biggest newsletter series we’ve ever done, and the past 10 years of my work on the internet have led us to this moment.

For the next 5 weeks, I’ll walk you through Mortimer J. Adler’s complete reading system from his book: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.

This is a book I find myself returning to once a year, and every re-read still brings unexpected insights. So, I decided to compile my notes and distil everything down to actionable frameworks for this series.

In week 1, we’ll give you an overview of his system from elementary reading to syntopical reading. These terms might sound foreign to you now, but they’ll make more sense after you finish today’s overview.

In week 2, we’ll tackle elementary reading & inspectional reading and give you a solid foundation in literacy that you've missed from your English classes.

In week 3, we’ll dive into the most demanding part of Adler's system: analytical reading. This will be the most challenging instalment in this series, but it also holds the most reward.

In week 4, we’ll apply analytical reading to specific genres like personal development books, poetry, literary fiction, etc., and show you how these principles play out in real-time.

And finally, in week 5, we’ll bring all the insights together and help you construct a syntopicon. This is the final stage of reading in Adler’s system, and it is the foundation of an effective commonplace book.

Also, I’ll be producing a comprehensive course later this year on Adler’s system, where we’ll anchor all the principles into practical demonstrations & exercises. So, if you’re keen for this series, make sure to upgrade to a Double-Shot subscription to get access to the whole thing!  

Mortimer J. Adler’s Reading System pt. 1: an overview

In 1940, Mortimer Adler identified a problem that still resonates with educators today.

In the opening chapters of How to Read a Book, Adler observed that despite a rise in college enrolments, graduates were still only trained in remedial reading. In other words, all of the reading instructions provided in high school and college were designed to overcome reading deficiencies instead of improving overall literacy. He writes:

‘To this day, most institutions of higher learning either do not know how to instruct students in reading beyond the elementary level or lack the facilities and personnel to do so.’

Keep in mind that this book was published in the 40s, and things have only gotten worse lately. In a college classroom today, not only are reading programs missing from the curriculum, but the skill of reading is also actively tarnished by shortened excerpts, the replacement of texts with video demonstrations, and the rise of AI summary tools.

What we have is a cohort of graduates who haven’t even been trained in elementary reading, let alone the higher levels of literacy, but this creates an opportunity for us.

My entire body of work boils down to one belief: anyone, anywhere can master the art of literacy if they start viewing reading as a trainable skill, not a natural talent. And this journey of learning to read again usually begins with recognising that perhaps, we’re not as proficient as we think we are with reading. Moreover, it also begins with recognising that, like any skill, there are stages of mastery.

We’ll never get mad if we can’t play Mozart during our first piano lessons, nor do we expect ourselves to win a sparring match when we’ve just walked into a dojo. But when it comes down to reading, most people are quick to call themselves ‘bad readers’ the minute they read something beyond their skill level.

This leads me to the overview of what I think is the most effective reading framework ever published in the last 100 years, and it has four stages that build on one another: