On Reading Plato: Hermeneutical Tools

Collecting organized thoughts on writings as complicated as Plato's dialogues is more difficult than I thought; when I said 'tomorrow', I probably meant 'sometime next week'. And here is next week (or the week after) and instead of a brief essay articulating questions which go right to the heart of the dialogue - so I flatter myself - I thought I should lay down for myself how to approach my most beloved philosopher. So here are some general guidelines for those who are not natural geniuses:

1. Plato was quite possibly wiser than you and wrote on purpose; every word in the dialogue is present with design and purpose. Nothing of importance is left to chance or happenstance. [N.B. this probably applies to all wise men]
2. Read slowly and repeatedly. When dissatisfied at the end of a dialogue (a first reading of the Hipparchus, for instance), start again, for you have only scratched the surface.
3. Become personally committed in seeking out the question at hand. If you do not care about what law is, how can you read the Minos profitably?
4. Where are oddities, contradictions, and sophistries present? Who is responsible for them? How do they come about, and why? 
5. Examine your primal reactions and associations at every turn. When answering a question to yourself, or probing a difficulty, strain your mind to search out alternatives, and ask always, "Why do I think this answer is true or sufficient?" 
6. What are the important terms of the dialogue (e.g. gain, good, etc. in the Hipparchus)? Do their meanings shift as the dialogue progresses? If so, how? Do the interlocutors understand the terms differently? If so, how? 
7. Be honest in your difficulties and courageous in your perseverance.

 Using the above suggestions, I am curing all of my bad reading habits and getting beneath the surface of a text on my own for what is probably the first time in my life. Many of us are not used to reading carefully, and the Dialogues profit us when we bring all our mental faculties to bear as we read. Take notes, if that helps you, or annotate the book (I never do that), even. Anything to slow yourself down and approach the dialogue from a fresh angle. And when you are onto something, indulge your feelings of excitement.