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How to Read College Level Material
A Method For Reading College-Level Articles When you come back to school you may start reading your text or your article ... and stop, confused. There's so much information! What's important? Why is the author talking about X when he or she meant Y? Academic articles are always trying to prove some point. Unless they are very badly written they will not give you statement after statement without trying to relate those statements to a central idea or set of ideas. Your job is to figure out 1) what that idea is and 2) how the author proposes to support that point. Reading these articles should take you no more than two hours each, at most, and most you should be able to go through in an hour or less. If you find yourself taking longer than three hours for an article, come talk to me SOONER rather than later. A few years ago my then-fifteen-year-old niece, who is not really good academically, got the point of the articles I showed her in about an hour each. (She's now about to graduate from college, and is doing very well.) You’re not going to let a fifteen-year-old who says everything is “like whoa!” and who has green sparkly paint on her toenails beat you, are you?? I thought not. Of course, articles aren’t always straightforward, the way newspaper articles are. Even the simplest can require that before proving point A that one must understand Thing B. How to sort all that out? Well, you wouldn’t drive from Douglasville to Rome on back roads without a map, would you? You’d miss your turns and get really lost and frustrated. Same with an article. Only you can’t buy a map—you have to make one. Once you see where the author is going, it is easier to understand how and why each paragraph and piece of evidence is there. How do you make a map of an article? You should never just start at the beginning and try to plough your way through. Instead, skim it and do a rough outline of it: 1)Read the beginning—the first page or two—until you come to something that looks like a thesis,
2)Then read the end—the last few pages, looking for a summary. Are they the same? Is one a fuller statement than the other? If they aren’t the same, did you find the right thesis, or has the author flip-flopped?
3)Then pre-view the article, looking for main points. Your goal is to divide the article into rough topics. Skim the first and last sentence of each paragraph, and divide the article into chunks. Write these down in the margin of the paper or your notes---pages 3-7, talking about definitions. Pages 8-10, talking about causes (these are examples—don’t map these onto a real article!), etc.
4)Pay attention to words like thus, therefore, as a result, in consequence, because of, etc. These are signals that there is a small summary of the preceding paragraphs!
5)When you’re done, you should have an outline: Opening thesis, sections A, B, C, and D, and closing thesis or summary.
6)Only then do you start reading in earnest. Always remember to stop and ask yourself: how does this paragraph relate to the main point of the article? If you find yourself overwhelmed in words or ideas, go back to your outline. How does the paragraph you read fit into the overall theme of that subsection of the article? What about to the main argument? You may find, especially at the beginning, that as you read carefully you will revise your outline of the article, or that you didn’t correctly identify the thesis. Keep working! You will get MUCH better with practice—but practice is what it takes. |
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