Try to crack the nut yourself; it will hurt your hands, but it will break, and St. Thomas himself will instruct his pupil. For this end, as you read each article, consult carefully the different passages to which the editions refer you; consult the Index Tertius, an imperfect treasure, but a treasure all the same; compare text with text; make the different sources of information complete and illustrate one another, and draw up your own article. It is an excellent gymnastic, which will give your mind flexibility, vigor, precision, breadth, hatred of sophistry and of inexactitude, and at the same time insure you a progressively increasing store of notions that will be clear, deep, consecutive, always linked up with their first principles and forming by their interadaptation a sound synthesis.

Sertillanges (on the exercise of composing articles like those of St. Thomas)