Reading Strategies

When it comes to your reading for a course, do any of these thoughts sound familiar?

I am spending way too much time reading for class. I’m overwhelmed.

I complete the reading, but I haven’t learned or remembered much.

I’m sometimes lost in class and don’t know how to contribute to the discussion.

These are common problems and they all relate to a more fundamental question of how you read. Reading for a social science course requires some different skills than reading literature or news articles, for example. Here are some broad strategies to try as you adapt your reading to this course.

Read critically

Critical reading is not about having an opinion about the reading. It is about first understanding the author(s) on their own terms and then assessing how well or poorly they achieve their own aims. It may seem counterintuitive, but reading critically means suspending judgment until you understand as fully as possible.

We will use a common approach to begin our class discussion of readings, and you should apply this approach in your own independent reading and annotation before class:

  1. Identify the Problem Statement (PS): This is the author’s statement of what intellectual or real-world problem they are concerned with in the reading. You should be able to restate this yourself for each reading we have.
  2. Identify the Argument (ARG) and how it relates to the PS: Arguments are sometimes stated explicitly and clearly, and other times are only implicit.
  3. Relate the Evidence (EV) to the ARG. Once you’ve identified the PS and ARG of the text, all the other details in a text should be easier to assess. If you know the ARG, you can keep that in mind as you read more closely and piece together the evidence and anecdotes the author(s) use to build their case.

You’ll notice that this approach is structural, and even a little formulaic. Some readings may not have a clear PS or a clear ARG, but that’s okay – that’s the kind of thing you can be more aware of as you read critically.

Don’t use brute force

One sure waste of time is to simply sit down and read cold, beginning at the beginning and pushing to the end, in one sitting. If you make it to the end, chances are good you won’t really understand much. It might feel like you’ve “done” the reading, but you may have missed the big picture and the important points.

Read in multiple passes

A more strategic and efficient approach to reading is take multiple passes through the text, each time increasing in depth and detail. This will likely take less time than a brute-force approach, and builds in more active engagement with the text.

Here is an approach to experiment with:

  1. Skim the entire reading quickly (5 min): How is this text organized? What is it about, broadly? What do you already know?
  2. “Skip” through the reading (10min): Dip in and out of the reading in key places: the abstract (if any), introduction, and conclusion. What is the problem statement, and overall argument or thesis? What do you not already know?
  3. Map the structure the reading (20min): Read more intently now, reading the opening and closing paragraphs of each subsection. How does each section relate to the PS and ARG? What evidence is being used? You might want to spend some additional time here drawing a preliminary concept map, which can be very helpful with more difficult texts, even if only to keep track of key terms and evidence.
  4. “Read” (30-60m+): Once you’ve made a few passes and have identified the important information and structure of the reading, you’re ready to read beginning to end. Keep the PS and ARG in mind, review and update your concept map if you have one, keep track of key examples, and read more analytically, assessing how well the argument is supported.
  5. Review (15-30 min, the following day): This is a powerful bonus step. Once you’ve taken a few passes of your reading, take a break – ideally a night’s sleep to help consolidate your thinking – and repeat the first few steps above, reviewing the PS/ARG/EV and generating some ideas or questions to share with class.

Become familiar with the form

Academic journal articles often follow a predictable sequence. Physical science articles might closely follow the “IMRaD” structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). However, many articles in the social sciences and humanities follow a more thematic structure. In both cases, however, the PS and ARG can usually be found in the abstract, toward the end of the introductory section, and often in the conclusion. Knowing where to look for important information can make you a much more efficient reader.

Read selfishly

Reading most academic research is different than reading fiction or philosophy – the goal very often is to identify and evaluate findings or theories that are useful to you in some way. Your primary goal as a reader, then, is to accurately squeeze out of texts the insights and information that help you develop your own thinking, and to do so as efficiently as possible.

If you’re reading for class, with an assigned reading, use the critical reading approach below to help orient you to what is important in the text, and generate some ideas or questions to share in class.

If you’re reading for your own research, constantly ask, “What do I need or want from this text?,” “How can this text help me?” Never commit to reading until you are sure it is relevant and valuable to you in some way. There is just too much out there to read indiscriminately.

In more advanced phases of research, your reading should aim at synthesis, at putting multiple readings into conversation with one another in a way that supports your own original ideas or argument. See Synthesis Writing.