When Keats read Chapman’s Homer and said that a new planet swam into his ken, he expressed for all readers the sense of surprise, of discovery, and of acquisition when they have found a real book.
Into this noble fellowship you and I are allowed to enter, as we leave our college.
III—THE USE OF THE PEN
Says the census-taker once in ten years, “Can you write English?” We are a bit startled by the question: “Can we?” we ask ourselves humbly. It is the question I ask you freshmen.
The educated person has the implements of writing at hand and in order: his inkstand is filled and his pen does not scratch. The uneducated man searches for a penholder, and keeps the ink-bottle on the top shelf; and the difference signifies much in the lives of the two people.
You live pen in hand during your four years in college. You acquire the useful art of note-taking,—by itself no mean intellectual exercise. The untrained note-taker brings from a lecture a rare muddle of senseless, half-caught remarks. But a good mind soon shows itself in its taking of “points” and getting them quickly to paper. And who does not know that “a note taken on the spot is worth a cartload of recollections”?
That a notebook should be attractive and convenient for reference is its raison d’être. One secret of comfort in notebooks is variety in covers, that there may be no exasperating searches for the right one. “Buy only good-looking notebooks,” sounds like frivolous advice; but it is in the interests of scholarship that your notebooks should have an honorable place on your bookshelves. I would make a handsome page, with wide margins, large type, generous spacing. Paragraph freely, and drop a line often. Underline profusely, that you may catch the meaning quickly, and preserve the emphasis of the lecturer. Use parentheses, brackets, numerals, letters, and thus organize your matter as you go along and make it easy to glance at. Have divisions or pigeonholes at the back of your book, where you can put away and classify all sorts of memoranda.
With these mechanical devices, the use of the pen becomes the easier. It will be able to shape sentences on the wing, and capture the thought and much of the language of a lecturer in full flight. It is a strenuous exercise, and good mental athletics.
Yet for all education to be carried on in this way would not be well. There should be variety in the conduct of classes. That comes of itself, through the varied personality of teachers. The next man may make of his hour a quiz. Does anything remain of a quiz that can be written down? A good exercise for the pen to shape something out of the flying questions and answers!
You live pen in hand in the classroom, and also in the preparation of your work. Note-taking in a library is a fine process in education. Unless your book is a masterpiece of style, paraphrase and condense for your notebook. Add your own thoughts, in brackets. A book thus read is twice yours. I would date every piece of note-taking; for the autobiography of your mind is writing itself.