5 ms·

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 lengt

by 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
  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 <when to look up words in the dictionary> (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."
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    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.
    - caminante 11y ago
      Sorry, I'm not following your ad hominem nor how its related to the thread.
      - to3m 11y ago
        I don't know if I've internalized its advice myself necessarily, but I used my stopwatch and it took me pretty much exactly 2 minutes to read. I studied subjects at school that required a lot of reading, and so I probably got the practice from that. (Of course, not all texts are suitable for reading this way.) What you appear to have done is: spend 10 minutes reading the article, then 5 minutes complaining about how it is unreasonable to expect anybody to read 3,000 words. 15 minutes in total. (All times are estimates.) Perhaps a better course of action would be: spend 10 minutes reading the article, and then wonder perhaps how you could put its advice into practise. 15 minutes in total. Suppose you take its advice to heart and immediately end up being able to do what I did and read articles such as this one in 2 minutes. Your total time investment for reading n articles (excluding this one) will then be 15+2n. Maybe it takes longer to get the hang of, and it works out as 15+5n? But suppose you continue as you are - time investment for the same will be more like 15+10n. A steeper graph. (And actually, more like 20+10n, because those 5 minutes you spent complaining are now spent.) I think this is the guy's point. (How do I spend the time I save? Why, by writing comments such as this, of course.)

by huac 11y ago

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
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 <when to look up words in the dictionary> (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."
- jacobolus 11y ago
  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.
  - caminante 11y ago
    Sorry, I'm not following your ad hominem nor how its related to the thread.
    - to3m 11y ago
      I don't know if I've internalized its advice myself necessarily, but I used my stopwatch and it took me pretty much exactly 2 minutes to read. I studied subjects at school that required a lot of reading, and so I probably got the practice from that. (Of course, not all texts are suitable for reading this way.) What you appear to have done is: spend 10 minutes reading the article, then 5 minutes complaining about how it is unreasonable to expect anybody to read 3,000 words. 15 minutes in total. (All times are estimates.) Perhaps a better course of action would be: spend 10 minutes reading the article, and then wonder perhaps how you could put its advice into practise. 15 minutes in total. Suppose you take its advice to heart and immediately end up being able to do what I did and read articles such as this one in 2 minutes. Your total time investment for reading n articles (excluding this one) will then be 15+2n. Maybe it takes longer to get the hang of, and it works out as 15+5n? But suppose you continue as you are - time investment for the same will be more like 15+10n. A steeper graph. (And actually, more like 20+10n, because those 5 minutes you spent complaining are now spent.) I think this is the guy's point. (How do I spend the time I save? Why, by writing comments such as this, of course.)