Turn a full nonfiction book into trustworthy reading notes, a discussion guide, and quiz material: map the argument before summarizing, capture verbatim notes with locators first, check every quoted claim against the text, distill themes with counterpoints, and run a quality pass by genre (history, science, business). Use when distilling a book for study, teaching, a book club, or a team read, or when an existing summary needs verification.
name: "book_distillation" description: "Turn a full nonfiction book into trustworthy reading notes, a discussion guide, and quiz material: map the argument before summarizing, capture verbatim notes with locators first, check every quoted claim against the text, distill themes with counterpoints, and run a quality pass by genre (history, science, business). Use when distilling a book for study, teaching, a book club, or a team read, or when an existing summary needs verification."
Book Distillation
Purpose
Produce a distillate a reader can trust and a teacher can use the same day. A distillate is three linked outputs built from one verified base: reading notes, a discussion guide, and quiz material. The base is an argument map plus a claim ledger where every quotation and every load bearing claim carries a chapter and page or location locator. If a claim has no locator, it does not ship.
This skill differs from a personal reading workflow. Reading nonfiction helps one reader retain a book. This skill builds a checked, shareable record that other people will study, teach from, and be quizzed on, so verification is part of the job, not a final polish.
Workflow
1. Lock the edition and set the job
- Record the exact edition before any notes: title, author, publisher, year, ISBN if given, and format. Page numbers differ across editions, so a locator without an edition is weak evidence.
- Record the intended use in one line: study, teaching, book club discussion, or team decision. The use sets depth. A book club distillate needs strong discussion questions. A teaching distillate needs a full quiz bank.
- If you do not have the full text, say so at the top of the distillate and work only from what was supplied. Never fill gaps from memory of the book or from reviews of it.
2. Map the argument before summarizing anything
Use the first stage of analytical reading from Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book (revised edition, 1972).
- Classify the book by kind and subject, and name the genre track from step 6 that will apply.
- State what the whole book is about in one sentence, then in one short paragraph.
- List the major parts in order and show how each part serves the whole. Use the table of contents as a hypothesis, then correct it after reading.
- State the problem or problems the author set out to solve, in the author's terms where you can find them stated.
- Build the key terms list as you go: each term, the meaning the author gives it, and the chapter where that meaning is set. Authors often use a common word in a narrow way, and most summary errors start there.
Do not write chapter summaries yet. A summary written before the map exists will follow the chapter order and miss the argument.
3. Take verbatim first chapter notes
Work chapter by chapter, using the survey, question, read, recite, review sequence from Robinson's SQ3R method for each chapter.
- Survey the chapter: headings, figures, tables, opening and closing paragraphs.
- Turn the headings into questions and write the questions down before reading.
- Read to answer those questions. Capture notes in three separate columns, and keep them separate.
- Verbatim: exact wording in quotation marks, with chapter and page or location, plus line context of one phrase before and after if the quote could be misread alone.
- Paraphrase: the same point in your own words, written with the book closed where practical.
- Reaction: your question, doubt, example, or connection. Label it as yours, never as the author's.
- Recite at the end of each chapter: close the book and write what the chapter claimed, what evidence it offered, and what it assumed. Anything you cannot recite goes back on the read list.
- Mark the most important sentences in each chapter. Those sentences carry the propositions the argument rests on, in Adler's terms. Each one becomes an entry in the claim ledger in step 4.
Borrow the Cornell page shape when notes are on paper: a wide notes area, a narrow cue column for questions, and a summary block at the bottom of each chapter page written in your own words.
4. Build and check the claim ledger
The claim ledger is the trust layer. One row per load bearing claim.
- Claim, stated in one sentence in your own words.
- Support: verbatim quote or a tight paraphrase, never both blurred together.
- Locator: chapter plus page, or chapter plus location for an ebook with no stable pages.
- Kind: definition, factual claim, causal claim, recommendation, or author's opinion. Opinions get attributed every time they appear in the distillate.
- Status: verified, contested, or unverified. Unverified claims are cut or flagged in the output, never smoothed over.
Check every direct quotation against the original text, word by word, before it enters the ledger. Follow the standard quotation rules: reproduce wording, spelling, and punctuation exactly, mark omissions with ellipses, put any inserted or changed word in brackets, and note added emphasis. If you found a quote inside another source, go to the original book and quote from there, or mark it as a secondhand quote with its immediate source named.
5. Distill themes, then add counterpoints
- Group ledger claims into three to six themes. A theme is a claim the book makes more than once, across chapters, not a topic word. Write each theme as a full sentence a reader could agree or disagree with.
- For each theme, list the strongest evidence the book offers and the weakest link in that evidence: a missing comparison, a single case doing heavy work, a term that shifts meaning, or a claim with no source inside the book.
- Only now criticize, and only after you can state the author's position in a way the author would accept. Use Adler's criticism checks: show where the author is uninformed, misinformed, illogical, or has left a stated problem unsolved. Each criticism needs a ledger locator or an outside source you name.
- Add one counterpoint section per theme: the best opposing view you can source, what it would need to be true, and what in the book, if anything, answers it. If you cannot source a counterpoint, write that plainly instead of inventing one.
6. Apply the genre track
Read references/genre-playbooks.md and apply one track. The short version:
- History: separate what happened, the author's interpretation, and the primary sources quoted. Source every quoted document by creator, date, purpose, and audience, and flag any factual claim that rests on a single source with no corroboration.
- Science: separate claim, method, and result for each study the book reports. Note sample and comparison in plain words when the book gives them, flag popular summaries of studies you did not check in the original paper, and keep correlation language as correlation.
- Business: separate a story about one company from a rule the author draws from it. Record the time period and market conditions around each case, flag survivorship problems where only winners are examined, and turn each recommendation into the condition it depends on.
7. Build the teaching outputs from the ledger only
Discussion guide and quiz items must trace back to ledger rows. If an item has no ledger row, add the row and verify it first, or drop the item.
- Discussion guide: write nine to twelve open ended questions in three levels. Level one, identification: questions with a checkable answer in the text that get the group aligned on what the book says. Level two, interpretation: questions that need proof from the text and allow more than one defensible answer. Level three, connection: questions that link the book to a decision, a current case, or the readers' own work, and ask for textual support anyway. Ban yes or no questions and questions answerable by recall alone above level one. Give each question a locator and a short facilitator note naming the passage to return to when discussion drifts.
- Quiz material: build items across the revised Bloom taxonomy from Anderson and Krathwohl (2001): Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create. A balanced set for one book is twelve items: three Remember, three Understand, two Apply, two Analyze, one Evaluate, one Create. Every item ships with an answer key or a scoring note, its Bloom level, and its source chapter. Recall items test the book's key terms and central claims, not trivia. Evaluate and Create items need a rubric of two to four points, not a single right answer.
- Reading notes: assemble the notes output from the argument map, the chapter recite paragraphs, and the themes. Keep quotations short and rare. Most of the notes should be accurate paraphrase with locators.
Templates for all three outputs are in assets/distillate-template.md.
8. Run the quality pass
Run scripts/check_distillate.py on the finished file and fix what it reports. Then do the manual pass in references/verification-and-quality.md. The short version:
- Quote audit: recheck every quotation against the text, or, for a long book, every quotation in the themes and teaching outputs plus a sample of five from the chapter notes. Record the count checked.
- Locator audit: no theme, discussion question, or quiz item lacks a chapter reference.
- Voice audit: search the draft for the author's name used as a verb of fact, for example "the author proves", and soften any claim the book only argues for.
- Cold read: a reader who has not seen the book should be able to state the thesis, name two themes, and name one counterpoint after reading only the first page of the distillate. If not, rewrite the first page.
Output Contract
Deliver one distillate file with these sections, in this order:
- Edition and use line, plus a line stating whether the full text was available.
- Argument map: one sentence thesis, one paragraph summary, parts list, author's problems, key terms.
- Chapter notes: one recite paragraph per chapter, with locators on load bearing points.
- Themes: three to six themes, each with evidence, weakest link, and counterpoint.
- Discussion guide: nine to twelve questions in three levels, each with locator and facilitator note.
- Quiz bank: twelve items with Bloom level, answer key or scoring note, and source chapter for each item.
- Quality note: quotations checked count, claims cut as unverified, and any secondhand quotes flagged.
Operating Rules
- Never invent a quotation, page number, statistic, date, or study result. Unverifiable means cut it or label it as your own inference.
- Keep verbatim, paraphrase, and reaction separate at capture time. Blending them at capture time is where false quotes are born.
- Map before you summarize, and understand before you criticize. Reversing either order produces confident, wrong notes.
- Teaching outputs come from the ledger only. A good discussion question built on a misread passage is still a misread.
- Attribute opinions to the author every time. The distillate states facts, the book argues claims, and the reader judges. Keep those three voices distinct.
- Name the edition in every output that carries page numbers, and switch to chapter plus location locators when the edition changes.
- Write plainly. No em dashes. Short sentences where a claim is being checked, longer ones only where a theme is being explained.
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