Reading for Academic Success

Reading is NOT a passive process (neither is being in class). Pamela Lau, an associate professor and Director of Reading at Parkland Community College, defines reading as "engaging in a dialogue with the author." I couldn't agree more. But what does this mean? What does it look like to enter a dialogue with someone who (most likely) isn't there? Here are just a handful of ideas:

• Identify the author's purpose. Is it to entertain? To persuade? To educate? Your way of reading the text should be strongly influenced by the author's purpose. For example, if you know the goal is to entertain, you can (and should!) suspend your disbelief. But if you decide that the author's goal is to educate (most class readings have this goal), you need to read in a way that facilitates maximum comprehension and retention of information that the author is trying to convey. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Understand the gestalt of the reading. Think of possible counter-examples. Critique the arguments based on what you've learned elsewhere. Then try to predict how the author would respond to these arguments. Think of related course topics and consider how the author would address them. For example, if you're reading something written by Carl Rogers (or something about Rogers), you should be able to predict what Rogers would say about a variety of concepts, including dreams, counter-transference, insight, etc., based on his theories -- even if the reading did not actually discuss them explicitly.
  
  
• Actively integrate the material with lecture and other readings. How does it fit? Where does it fit? How is it consistent and inconsistent with previously discussed theories? Understand how in-class lectures relate to the text.
  
  
• Identify author's concessions. Especially in persuasive articles, but also in other types of writing, the author will acknowledge arguments and data that do not necessarily support their position. The world is complex and so are people. Don't ignore these concessions. If they weren't important, the author wouldn't make them. Instead, find a way to reconcile seemingly conflicting information.
  
  
• Recognize "strawman" positions. In some ways, these are the opposite of concessions. Make sure that you are clear about what arguments the author actually believes and which they are only making for the purpose of tearing them down.

 

• Identify the reader's (your!) purpose. Readers also have their own agenda, which also influences how they read the text. Sometimes the purpose is to find some specific bit of information, in which case skimming is a good strategy. Other times, the purpose is to learn what happened from the print media, in which case you can rely on the inverted pyramid structure of journalistic writing to give you the most important information first. For this class (and many others), your goals should be to 1) gain maximum comprehension of key ideas, 2) be able to apply theories and concepts in the readings to new situations, and 3) to integrate new concepts with previously discussed theories. Another way to approach this (if you are reading a textbook) is to carefully read the goals that are usually described at the beginning of each chapter and then read in order to meet those goals. Remember, reading for the purpose of learning is hard work. Most of the time, skimming is a way of being lazy. You'll maximize your chances of doing well in any course if you read carefully and use the strategies outlined on this page.

• Annotate but don't highlight. As long as you own the book (even if you plan to sell it later), annotating is the best active strategy you can use to facilitate learning. By annotating, I mean interacting with the author in the text and margins. Underline concepts that are particularly important, ask questions that come to mind in the margins (you can try to answer them yourself or with a study partner or you can ask them in class or office hours), make connecting and integrating comments, critique the argument, the data supporting the argument, or the methods used to obtain the data. Why not highlight? Because it's too easy and isn't an active process. Students generally highlight too much of the text (we've all seen the books that glow in the dark), without really understanding why they're highlighting. Think of it this way, if your friend reads your annotations, they would probably have a good idea about what you were thinking when you were reading the text, but the highlighting, especially indiscriminant highlighting, would probably be relatively meaningless.