While reading, you should have 4 questions you need to answer:
- What is the book about?
- What is said in detail, and how?
- Is the book (partially) true?
- What of it? What is the significance?
For inspectional reading, focus only on the first 2 questions.
Ideas for taking notes:
- Underline key lines
- Vertical lines at the margin (to emphasize an underlined line or to mark a passage where underlining is tedious)
- Margin marks (e.g. star). Do this sparingly. Perhaps for the 10-12 most important statements/paragraphs. Consider also folding the corner so you can easily find these key pages.
- Numbers in the margin to denote a sequence of points to an argument.
- Numbers of other pages in the margin (cross-referencing)
- Write questions that come up in your head. Perhaps in the margin, or the top or bottom of the page.