
How to Read in College - woodcroft
https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/permanent-features-advice-on-academia/how-to-read-in-college/
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clearf
The comments here remind me a little of Pierre Bayard's delightful(ly)
postmodern monograph, _How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read_ [0].

It's an entertaining read.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read-
ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read-
ebook/dp/B0049U444U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)

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lnanek2
I don't really find his initial assertion correct at all:

> Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion.

I took a chembio and CS bachelors degree at an expensive private institution
and a software development masters at a large public institution and read all
assigned reading quite easily. Actually, I'd usually read all the textbooks
before the semester even started.

That said, I do find his speed reading methods useful. I'd usually speed read
the book a couple times first before reading entirely through, and speed read
the relevant chapter before any exam. If you only read the reading material
once through, you are doing something wrong, since that isn't the way to
memorize it.

~~~
gargarplex
> I don't really find his initial assertion correct at all

> any normal fashion

>Actually, I'd usually read all the textbooks before the semester even
started.

Check your logic

~~~
dwmtm
He covered this:

> I'd usually speed read

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gargarplex
Clarify the syllogism?

~~~
dwmtm
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It
involves Russia." \- Woody Allen

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manish_gill
Good advice. I recently took the GRE exam (required for Grad School admissions
in the US) and this article mirrors the advice almost all books (including the
official guide) prescribe. When reading dense academic literature, you want to
read actively and have an eye for detail, but at the same time, you don't want
to get stuck on a particularly complicated sentence. You want to quickly
gather up a few important things:

1\. Context

2\. Main Idea

3\. Tone

4\. Assumptions

5\. Implications

6\. Conclusion

7\. Intent of Author

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Lorento
It wasn't till after I graduated that I started to realize the enormous volume
of books arts majors had to read. And I don't understand why their information
is presented in such an inconvenient format.

If the book is making an argument with a lot of discrete points and
interconnections. Why isn't it a diagram or some kind of interactive
hyperlinking thing? Why don't the individual points at least have a box around
them so you can separate them visually from the other stuff without having to
actually read it all?

Arts text books and essays just don't make sense to me. I can understand text
format if it gives the reader motivation to understand that a soul-less
diagram might not, but it sounds like most of this writing doesn't do that
either. So I guess my question is, is this information really too complex to
structure in an obvious way, or are the authors too lazy to design such a
structure, or is it simply an ingrained culture that nobody can break free of?

~~~
nmyk
Reading is a skill, like anything else. If you're good at it, there's nothing
inconvenient about the format at all.

Consider that a command-line interface is an extremely inconvenient way for
most people to use a computer but perfectly natural for others.

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caminante
I can't tell if this is a prank.

A post on "How to Read in College" targeted at college age students who
(paraphrased) _" can't possibly read everything assigned to them"_ goes
over...3000 words without even an overview?

He then adds nonsense disclaimers, buried at the end. This post is hopeless.

~~~
huac
it's verbose because he uses examples from a specific reading. this was
originally in print; had it been written for the web, with shorter
expectations of length, it could be summed up pretty concisely.

his disclaimers are hot garbage though. "NONE of this advice applies ... if
you’re otherwise operating in a discipline where close reading is centrally
important to the way the discipline thinks" and goes on to say "my advice is
most useful in ... literary or cultural criticism" \- derrida would like to
have a word with you about how you think literary criticism doesn't involve
close reading

disclaimer: i skimmed the article

~~~
jacobolus
This guy is a history professor. A history student at a school of Swarthmore
caliber who has e.g. two upper division history courses plus one course in a
related field like philosophy/political science/sociology/cultural criticism
and maybe one physical science course or something to satisfy some general ed
requirements is going to be assigned something like 1000+ pages per week of
reading, in addition to a substantial amount of writing and whatever work that
science course requires, and of course time spent in lectures and discussions.

If the student tries to read everything carefully at a leisurely pace, that’s
going to take 25+ hours a week of just reading.

History students can’t afford the time to read everything line by line. They
need to learn to skim, track the structure of the argument, figure out which
bits are fluff and skip over those, and then focus down on the tricky
sections.

It’s not that close reading isn’t also important in those fields (it
absolutely is!), but not everything can be read closely.

To the grandparent poster: 3000 words is peanuts compared to the kind of
reading loads this professor is talking about.

~~~
wyclif
I don't mean for this to be a "you kids get off my lawn" type comment, but
back in my day 1000+ pages/wk was not unusual. But this rarely meant reading
every word; the ability to summarise and skim is crucial to how easily you
read that many pages:

[http://londoninternational-blog.com/2014/01/10/1000-pages-
pe...](http://londoninternational-blog.com/2014/01/10/1000-pages-per-week/)

At least the '1000 page rule' seemed to be the expectation if you were, like
me, a humanities student at a private university in the US or UK in the days
of yore.

~~~
eitally
It was the same for me (UVA, BA double major in History & Religious Studies,
'99).

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thejerz
Reading this reminds me how happy I am to be graduated.

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thejerz
Skimmed it.

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sanoy
better title how to read like a hack. Or how to read like a entrepreneur.

~~~
caminante
Don't make fun of Tai Lopez...he's got Lambos and a bookshelf FILLED with
books in his garage. ;-)

edit: TL's the youtube ad guy who claims he can teach you how to read ANY book
in 10min.

~~~
xasos
Video for anyone who hasn't seen it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKp_jFxQJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKp_jFxQJc)

It has also spawned plenty of parodies :)

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Kenji
Stopped reading at

 _The first rule, in some ways the only rule, is skim, skim, skim._

Nonsense, try to do that in a mathematical text and you understand literally
nothing anymore. This might work for lightweight texts, not densely written
heavily mathematical and algorithmic texts. Maybe that works if you're
studying something like literature and don't need to understand complex things
afterwards.

EDIT: He's a professor of history. I am not surprised.

EDIT2: brudgers is right, the professor wrote like 2000 words later that none
of his advice applies to the situation I mentioned. I think he should have
clarified that in the beginning instead of the end of the post. Introducing a
rule as universal and introducing exceptions much later is not a good
practice.

~~~
brudgers
When I skimmed the article, I discovered that the author identifies contexts
in which different tactics are appropriate in the latter half of the article.

