Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago

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A big chunk of reading is about precisely understanding the author's meaning. Authors can spend many paragraphs just explaining what they mean by a single sentence or a single term. As readers, we need to be alert to these nuances in meaning. Here's a short video on how to do that.

00:00 Introduction
00:59 Old words and new words
1:42 Some examples
2:35 Step 1 - identifying the words
5:07 Step 2 - figuring out what the words mean
9:06 Why not stick to a one-to-one mapping?
11:38 Help make the world smarter

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The quote from "A Philosophy of the Unsayable" by William Franke that I used can be found on page 154 of the 1st edition (2014).

This video and other videos in this series are based on the book: How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. I highly recommend it. You can purchase it here: bookshop.org/a/91541/9780671212094.

Edited by Presage: https://www.presage.media/