5 ms·

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

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.

personjerry 11y ago
3000 words isn't much for the typical college student reading 100+ pages a week
- caminante 11y ago
  Let'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 ago
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
- 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 ago
  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 11y ago
    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-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 ago
      It was the same for me (UVA, BA double major in History & Religious Studies, '99).
    - cdcarter 11y ago
      That's exactly why this is an article on summarizing and skimming techniques!
  - caminante 11y ago
benkuykendall 11y ago
It's a little meta. You have to apply the techniques learned to the post itself as you read it.

personjerry 11y ago

3000 words isn't much for the typical college student reading 100+ pages a week

caminante 11y ago
Let'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 ago

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

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 ago
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 11y ago
  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-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 ago
    It was the same for me (UVA, BA double major in History & Religious Studies, '99).
  - cdcarter 11y ago
    That's exactly why this is an article on summarizing and skimming techniques!
- caminante 11y ago

benkuykendall 11y ago

It's a little meta. You have to apply the techniques learned to the post itself as you read it.