In syntopical reading the books are secondary to your needs, unlike analytical reading when you study the book's content.
Step 1 of syntopical reading: find passages relevant to your concerns.
Step 2: identify correspondence between your terms and author's terms.
Step 3: come up with clear questions which both, if answered sequentially, solve your original problem, and seem to be answered (even if implicitly) by most of the authors of the books in the syntopical reading set. Order questions from more generic to more specific.
Step 4: find issues (contradictions about questions) and group them into controversies.
Step 5: analyze. All conflicting answers may be supported by convincing arguments. The new knowledge is the discussion itself, description of the tradeoff or the enabling conditions for different positions. (Cf. ‣, Emergence)
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