On July 31, 2011, Gary Carpenter spoke at the Family Prayer Center about Assimilating The Word. I asked if I could tell about how I do it, and he handed the mic over to me for a few moments. In this post, I would like to go into more detail because a couple of people have asked for more information.
I have a folder that holds several confessions and the text of the book that I am assimilating at the time. I have prepared the text of every book of the New Testament in a format without chapter and verse markings.
I started with the E-Sword Bible software. It is a free program that comes with the King James Version. I paid extra for a module of the New American Standard Bible, because that is the translation I use.
I then would take the text of each book and clipboard it into a word processor. I worked mostly one book at a time, but for books that are related, I would combine them into a single document - such as 1 & 2 Corinthians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, etc.
In the E-Sword program, you cannot just highlight text to copy it to the clipboard. You have to use a function called "Copy Verses." Right-click in the text area and choose Copy Verses. A dialog box opens. Now you can select the range of verses to copy and the format. By default, the verse underneath your pointer at the time you right-clicked is selected as the first and last verse in the range. Use the drop-down windows to select the first and last verses of the chapter as the respective beginning and end points of the range. Format option #7 will copy the verses as a single block of text with the chapter and verse reference in parentheses at the end.
Once you have clipboarded in all the chapters, then you can edit the text into a more readable format.
First thing I did was to erase all those chapter references.
I wanted to use a different font than what E-Sword used, so I would highlight the entire book and choose Arial, and set the font size to 10.
Italics would usually show as gray, so I would highlight the text and change the color. For a book without red letters, I would highlight the entire book and select black. For red letters, I would select the entire section of red and pick a shade of red that was darker than the default shade.
If the book is more than 3 pages, I usually add page numbers at the bottom of the pages. This helps keep the pages in order when loading them into the folder.
Then I would break the text up into paragraphs and contexts. I found that working from the end to the beginning made detecting the start and end points easier.
For the Gospels and Acts, I followed some of the guidelines I learned in community college:
Two spaces between sentences,
Space after every comma, colon and semicolon,
New paragraph for every change in speaker in a conversation or dialogue,
For a quotation of more than one paragraph, use only one ending quotation mark at the end of the last paragraph.
Quotations from the Old Testament would appear in all caps. If an OT quotation was more than two lines, I would separate it out from the rest of the text by starting each sentence or major clause on a new line.
Once I was through with all the editing, I would convert the file to .PDF format. I don't have a printer of my own, so I save the PDF onto a thumb drive and print it out at FedEx Office (used to be Kinko's).
Everything in my confession & assimilation folder is in page protectors. When I am through with reading and assimilating a book, I put it a large binder with the other books. Because some of these books cost a bit to print out, and I have gone through the NT once already, that binder is probably one of the most expensive NT's outside of a library or museum collection.
The E-Sword software is available at: http://www.e-sword.net/.
The word processor I use is the Open Office Writer. Open Office is a free alternative to MS Office and is available at http://www.openoffice.org/.
Open Office can export files directly to PDF's. If you already have a word processor that you like, and it doesn't support PDF's, you can download pdf995, a free PDF converter program at http://www.pdf995.com/. It installs itself as a printer driver, so you would use the Print command and choose PDF995 as the printer to convert a file.
If you decide to try this yourself, you can use different software if you desire.
Preparing a book for assimilation does takes some time. As you read, you might see where you need to change the beginning or end of a context or paragraph, so you might have to do more editing and reprint the book. I have. As they say, YMMV (your mileage may vary).
Even if you don't prepare a text without chapter and verse markings, i do encourage you to start assimilating the Word if you haven't already.
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