Hi, I'm Dr. Anadale, and today I want to talk briefly about a blog post by Dr. Miriam Sweeney,
titled "How to Read for Grad School," in which Dr. Sweeney gives four pieces of important
advice for reading academic texts.
I think they'll be beneficial to my students as well.
Her first piece of advice is to read strategically, not linearly.
And by this she means you don't want to read an academic work the way you would read a
novel, beginning on the first page, reading through all the way to the last page.
This is not the proper way to read academic texts at a high level.
The way you want to read an academic text is to begin by reading, I would say, the outside
material on the back of the book's cover, on the inside jacket copy, the author's biography,
the summary of the work, the table of contents.
All these things will give you an idea before you've read the first word of the text, of
what kind of project the book is dedicated to, what kind of thing the author takes herself to be doing.
You then want to read the Introduction to the book, and the last chapter.
You want to read these carefully, with an eye to seeing what's going on in the book
and whether it's going to be worth any more of your time.
In between the introduction and the conclusion, you want to be fairly selective about what you read.
You may read just a single chapter in its entirety, you might read the beginning and
end of a chapter, you might focus in on a particular chapter that's especially significant
or especially interesting for you.
But don't feel that you should be reading any academic book in a linear fashion, once
you get to graduate school.
For an article that you are reading, you would want to keep in mind first, the article title
and the journal title, in which it appears.
These are going to give you an important set of limiting principles for the limits of what
the author is doing.
You want to read carefully the abstract of any journal article that you pick up.
The abstract is carefully crafted by the author to give you a clear idea of what's going on
in the paper: its methods, its limits, its engagement and citations.
For a journal article, you'll want to begin by reading the introductory paragraphs, with
special attention to the framework and citations, which give you a sense of the neighborhood
in which the paper will take place, who the author regards as the immediate intellectual
neighbors of the thesis, who the author regards as important authorities with whom the author
is in dialogue.
You'll then want to read the conclusion of the paper.
Any conclusion to a journal article should include some kind of answer to the question
of why you, the reader, should care about the thesis that's being defended.
That should give you a good idea of how much of the rest of the paper to read and what
elements of the argument between the intro and conclusion you should focus on.
The second piece of advice Dr. Sweeney gives is to take notes while reading.
This is vitally important; you cannot absorb material at a high level from an academic
text if you're not taking notes while you are reading.
So you should have a note-taking system, either on paper, on sticky notes in the book, or
in the margins of the book itself, perhaps with a series of underlining.
One important principle that she reminds us of is to remember that future-you has no idea
what present-you is thinking as you read the book.
So you're going to have to leave enough notes in the book or in your notes for a future
version of you, either two months or two years from now, to be able to reconstruct the process
of thought that you're having.
So if a particular passage reminds you of an element in Plato, write the word "Plato"
in the margin, or even a citation to the doctrine of Plato that you're thinking of.
Don't just write the letter "P," for example.
The third piece of advice Dr. Sweeney gives is to be purposeful in your reading for graduate school.
By which would say, don't read just to have read.
Don't read something simply so you can go in class and tell the professor, "yes, I read
the book, I passed my eyes across all the words, I said most of the words to myself mentally."
You want to keep in mind as you read the context of the course, the context of your particular
project, perhaps a paper that you're composing, and you want to read in order to get relevant
information for *your* project, for *your* use.
So don't read in a dutiful fashion, read in a purposeful fashion, with those goals in mind.
And the fourth piece of advice she gives is to take a critical perspective.
This can mean many different things, depending on your field.
At the very least, I think it would mean asking, "What kind of values are implicit in this
piece of writing, in this piece of research, in this work?
And how would the work itself be different if we shifted some of the perspectives or
the assumptions or the values that underlie it?"
So, those are four pieces of advice for how to read in graduate school, by Dr. Miriam Sweeney.
I recommend you read the entire blog post.
I'll put a link in the description to this video.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.