words from a very effective author

[ADDENDUM: My caution was unnecessary, since the person in question says he does not mind being cited by name. He is Lee J. Braver, author of the wonderful book A THING OF THIS WORLD, an impressively systematic discussion of continental anti-realism. I wrote an article-length review of this book that appeared in Philosophy Today in 2008.]

Someone whose work I like a great deal just wrote in with this. I’m deleting all the personal parts and also breaking it into paragraphs for ease of reading. Otherwise, these are his exact words:

“What I always say about [my doctoral institution] is that I got a great education but a lousy apprenticeship. For one thing, I learned nothing about what it’s like to be a professor, etc. But also, I think of how Heidegger compares thought to a craft (near the beginning of [What is Called Thinking?]) which we must learn & practice (I take his form of writing which frequently hits dead-ends (Holzwege) & has to go back & start over again as giving the reader an apprenticeship in how thinking actually works rather than just presenting us decapitated conclusions on a platter).

If I were ever to teach grad students, I think I’d have each prof in the dept give a half-hour workshop (maybe 1 a week) on tips, tricks, and techniques they’ve developed. I simply would not be able to do what I do without a huge bag of tricks I cultivated over years of grinding it out. I mean the nitty-gritty stuff, like working out a consistent system of abbreviations to write in margins and different forms of underlining that signal different things (recap, thesis of the paragraph, interesting but not all that important to the argument, etc.). I have found it essential to have a set way of marking up my books (I cringe when I see students’ virginal texts).

In fact, I credit a lot of my big-picture perspective in [my book] to the fact that, after repeated slow & careful readings, I was able to skim sometimes a couple dozen texts in a few days by relying on my notations/underlining, etc. This is the sort of stuff no one talks about–the dust & detritus of a scholarly life, but I couldn’t function without it. So I think this is really useful stuff for grad students/young researchers & good on you for taking up the task of e-training.”

I would agree that the right markings in a text can be very useful. The state of my Heidegger volumes means that if necessary I could now write an article in a couple of days on almost any work by Heidegger, simply because I already have them condensed down to “highlights”. Once in awhile you feel like going back and doing a word-for-word reread with the best of them… Being and Time is always worth a cover-to-cover read now and then, obviously. But I agree with the author above that you also want to “process” the great works you read for quicker future use, and the right system of marginal notes is a good way to do that.