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How to Read in College
- lazymofo 11y agoAh, the overly verbose circlejerk of Academia. On the up-stroke you learn to extract fact from the layers of bullshit, and on the down-stroke you learn to wrap the facts you've discovered in layers of bullshit.
- caminante 11y agoI 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.
- personjerry 11y ago3000 words isn't much for the typical college student reading 100+ pages a week
- caminante 11y agoLet's say that you're reading for comprehension and read fast (200 wpm). That's 15 min. carved out of your discretionary time budget. That's significant, let alone the fact you're taking a chance ROI-wise by reading a random blog. Furthermore, asking "Can you?" is different than "Should you?" I'm hitting on the latter.
- huac 11y agoit'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
- littletimmy 11y ago> Derrida would like to have a word with you Yeah, but no intelligent person would like to have a word with Derrida...
- jacobolus 11y agoThis 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 11y agoI 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-per-week/ 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.
- eitally 11y agoIt was the same for me (UVA, BA double major in History & Religious Studies, '99).
- benkuykendall 11y agoIt's a little meta. You have to apply the techniques learned to the post itself as you read it.
- sanoy 11y agobetter title how to read like a hack. Or how to read like a entrepreneur.
- caminante 11y agoDon'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 11y agoVideo 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 :)
- ank_the_elder 11y agoMy 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.
- clearf 11y agoThe 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/B0049U444U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read-ebook/dp/...
- manish_gill 11y agoGood 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
- Kenji 11y agoStopped 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 11y agoWhen I skimmed the article, I discovered that the author identifies contexts in which different tactics are appropriate in the latter half of the article.
- Lorento 11y agoIt 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 11y agoReading 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.
- amelius 11y agoPerhaps this [1] is a format you would find convenient. [1] http://www.wikisummaries.org/Pride_and_Prejudice http://www.wikisummaries.org/Pride_and_Prejudice
- thejerz 11y agoReading this reminds me how happy I am to be graduated.
- thejerz 11y agoSkimmed it.
- lnanek2 11y agoI 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 11y ago> 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 11y agoHe covered this: > I'd usually speed read
- gargarplex 11y agoClarify the syllogism?
- dwmtm 11y ago"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." - Woody Allen
- rquantz 11y agoThis also is probably more focused on degrees in the humanities, where it is more common practice to have to a read a few books a week for a course, rather than a few chapters a week from a text book.
- 11y ago