For me, academic productivity isn’t just about getting good grades. It’s about getting an education. You can get through school with good grades and without an education - people do it all the time. Why I strive to find better ways to learn and succeed is not only so that I may do better in school, but so that I may learn more.
Learning how to read more effectively is one of those topics that always grabs me. There is so much I want to read, so many ideas I want to explore and so little time. Marx, Dostoevsky, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Berger. Many of the blogs I read seem to be ready to offer such hints in ways I may get more done in this regard, but what I realized just now is how little the productivity blogs and academic blogs really connect on this point.
Productivity blogs are full of posts about speed reading, reading more, etc. It’s all systems. And that’s great, because systems are what productivity people do. But you can also get a sense of just what they’re reading, and why many of these methods are not remotely productive for academic work (outside of text books proper, as they are actually designed in the same way many of these productivity and business books many of these sites are concerned with.)
Why is this important? Because such tips can and do lead people astray. It’s great when you’re reading books with very little… value content, shall we say. I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but there is a great deal of difference in weight and subtly between “Getting Things Done” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” or to take a book I’m reading for an independent study right now: “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker. And for that matter, any scholarly paper or text in general.
This is not to say some of this is not useful, but it is important to “grain of salt” all of this. Most these tips will work on the New York Times bestseller list, and many books at your local Borders - but not most of what you’ll be expected to read in college (hopefully, at least.) These books specialize in a very specific formula: telling you what they will tell you, making the points, backing up the points, eventually tie it all together. Most academic reading is, of course, the same. The difference is learning “you need an inbox” is quite a bit different than learning the intricacies and implications of the Oedipal complex (crazy as it may be) or what the Clash of Civilization is and what it implies. They are not even in the same class, with all due respect to Mr. Allen.
Most the time in school what you need to do is very simple:
Sit down with the book, a pen and paper, and perhaps a computer (I use my phone, I can get to a dictionary or wikipedia from it if I need to look something up, but just about anything else is inconvenient.)
And from that point, you read. That’s it. You go through and read the book, you underline important points and passages, pay special attention to introductions and conclusions, be sure to note special terminology, names and dates and that’s it. Maybe afterward take notes on the text.
There is a time for technology and clever tricks. There is also a time for elbow grease. If you want to get anything out of novel by Hermann Hesse or the Histories of Herodotus, skimming won’t do it.
As I believe Cal Newport points out in one of his books (I don’t recall which at the moment) it is true there are books you can get away not reading, and books you can get away not reading all. I do it all the time. Hell, some professors assign both bad texts and texts you never even discuss - that’s part of this game. But in many cases you do need to read, and if you try anything too fancy you are going to miss a great deal of the meat (and, by the way, the actual education) a book offers.
Just something to think about. What do you think?
19/09/2007 at 8:29 am Permalink
Well said. I passed the message along to my readers:
http://calnewport.com/blog/?p=101
19/09/2007 at 1:45 pm Permalink
Yes I agree with you in all points. I can hardly adapt e.g. the speed-reading-method (as pathetic I’m at it anyway) to academical literature. Sometimes you just have to read a passage a few times to get the idea, and you feel like swallowing a rock rather then a zip of water.
But I hope I can improve it sometime somehow, because I’m just a wretched slow reader (even in non-academical stuff)
22/09/2007 at 4:28 am Permalink
I also find those small, colored post-its to be very usefull. When I come over something nice/usefull/clever/nice-to-read, it’s good to have a way to find back to that page, and I don’t like ears on pages in my books.
So, I write a two-word description of what the page contains, and put a post-it there to find it again.
This, compared with underlining (or highlightning with a magic marker, it depends on what kind of paper quality really), is a good way to find back to the things you wanna go over again.
Lars
23/09/2007 at 1:15 pm Permalink
@Julian:
Yeah, speed-reading really doesn’t help much in academic writing. The best bet for you may be to do some of what lifehack pointed out (and I believe it’s all in the book I mentioned “How to Read a Book”) regarding taking in the book: go over the intro and conclusion paragraphs, and then just work your way through.
I’m generally a very fast reader but occasionally I hit something like a brick wall and really all I can suggest is give yourself more time to do or try to make some tough decisions regarding what you can ignore and what you can’t.
@LarsH
Yes, I love little post-its for that. I generally keep a those very tiny tab ones with me when I’m reading and do it the same way you mentioned.
Highlighting I generally ignore - it’s destroyed too many books over the years, and underlining just works better for me. But to each their own, of course.