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How to Read in College

blogs.swarthmore.edu

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Re: How to Read in College

#11

Post by jacobolus »

huac wrote: post #5
caminante wrote: post #3

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.

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 "m…

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.

Re: How to Read in College

#13

Post by wyclif »

jacobolus wrote: post #11
huac wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "m…

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 substanti…

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...

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.

Re: How to Read in College

#14

Post by caminante »

jacobolus wrote: post #11
huac wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "m…

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 substanti…

No. 3000 words is unnecessary for his argument and 10-15 min. of discretionary time is material. Partially to blame, and as another poster pointed out, the article was lifted from a text and maybe not packaged for a blog chunk.

With that, the author spends 2800 words to offer guidance on topics among which (really! that's a section in his post!) and then tops it off with two awful disclaimers that his advice to skim critically gets trumped if 1. you're taking a class requiring full apprehension and/or 2. your prof. has exacting standards.

I don't think a Swarthmore-caliber™ student needs a reminder on any of the above, let alone to hear this mess in 3000+ words. It's as simple as prioritizing your time across grades, interests, learning, etc. Priorities differ and depending on your goals, you can be expected to read/study/analyze 25+ hours a week for any given subject -- not just the "non-social sciences."

Re: How to Read in College

#15

Post by jacobolus »

caminante wrote: post #14
jacobolus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 substanti…

No. 3000 words is unnecessary for his argument and 10-15 min. of discretionary time is material. Partially to blame, and as another poster pointed out, the article was lifted from a text and maybe not packaged for a blog chunk. With that, the author spends 2800 words to offer guidance on topics among which (really! that's a section in his post!) and then tops it off with two awful disclaimers that his advice to skim…

If you had already internalized the advice in this article, you would have spent 2 minutes glancing through the post to decide it wasn’t relevant to your needs, and you wouldn’t have wasted 15 minutes reading it or another 30 minutes arguing about whether it was too wordy on a forum for computer programmers.

On the other hand, since you seem not to have previously learned the lessons this post is trying to teach, spending 15 minutes thinking about the argument and then applying what you learn whenever you need to skim in the future could save you many thousands of hours. Perhaps you should be writing to the author to thank him!

Cheers.

Re: How to Read in College

#16

Post by 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

Re: How to Read in College

#17

Post by ank_the_elder »

sanoy wrote: post #8

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

My thoughts exactly. Especially damning is "Nor would I personally want to talk at my students day in and day out" - I'm unsure as to why this person chose to become a teacher of any sort in the first place.

Re: How to Read in College

#18

Post by caminante »

jacobolus wrote: post #15
caminante wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. 3000 words is unnecessary for his argument and 10-15 min. of discretionary time is material. Partially to blame, and as another poster pointed out, the article was lifted from a text and maybe not packaged for a blog chunk. With that, the author spends 2800 words to offer guidance on topics among which (really! that's a section in his post!) and then tops it off with two awful disclaimers that his advice to skim…

If you had already internalized the advice in this article, you would have spent 2 minutes glancing through the post to decide it wasn’t relevant to your needs, and you wouldn’t have wasted 15 minutes reading it or another 30 minutes arguing about whether it was too wordy on a forum for computer programmers. On the other hand, since you seem not to have previously learned the lessons this post is trying to teach, spe…

Sorry, I'm not following your ad hominem nor how its related to the thread.

Re: How to Read in College

#19

Post by eitally »

wyclif wrote: post #13
jacobolus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 substanti…

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... At least the '1000 page rule' seemed to be the expectation if you were, like me, a humanities student at a…

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

Re: How to Read in College

#20

Post by 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.

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