Reading for Research

Photo credit: Sara Bell

One of the most daunting parts of research papers—and, admittedly, of college humanities courses at large—has been secondary reading. I had read journal articles for some classes in high school, but mostly for science classes: academic papers in the humanities were new to me, in particular highly theoretical ones. If you’re just starting out in college, or maybe taking an intense class in the humanities for the first time, you’ll benefit from being strategic about how you read. These tips carry through to humanities research, where secondary reading abounds. 

My best tip is simply to be patient with yourself and with the text. Particularly when writing is dense or somewhat inscrutable, it can be easy to forget why you’re there: to come to a better understanding of the ideas with which a paper is concerned. If you get frustrated with yourself, you’ll often end up missing the theoretical links between key ideas, and even the ideas themselves. If you’re going to actually be able to use the content of the reading, you need to go slowly, paying attention to whether you’re reading to get it over with or reading to ingest the information. 

Annotation can be useful in keeping yourself on this track, but be careful not to over-annotate! My high school English teacher once told me to always read with a pen in hand, but I’ve found I focus better in college if I put the pen down. Holding a pen the whole time distracts me from the reading, because it makes the act about annotating rather than actually reading: I’m looking for the next thing to underline. If you underline everything, not only does it make it harder for you to see what’s actually important when you come back to a paper days later, but it makes it harder to move through the paper’s thought process in real time. Make a mark when something is striking, confusing, problematic, central, or intriguing, and leave large chunks of underlining for after you’ve finished the paper, when you’re trying to locate the parts that matter the most. 

Reverse-outlining is one of my favorite tools for understanding any piece of writing, whether you’re trying to prepare for discussion in CC or editing a piece you’ve written yourself. It is what it sounds like: after you’ve finished reading a section or an entire text, you create an outline for it in the margin of the paper. (It may be helpful to print your readings at a slightly smaller scale than normal to give you more space in the margins if you’re planning to reverse-outline.) Try to capture key sections, structural devices, and the flow of thought in your outline. For me, this has proven to be the most helpful form of annotation, because it helps me resist that urge to over-annotate: instead, it requires me to stop at the end of a paragraph or section and ask myself what I just read, as if I am my own teacher. Plus, if you’re going to be discussing the text, it helps you easily locate interesting sections more quickly. 

Finally, be honest with yourself about how much time and attention you can give a piece of writing. It’s often better to fully read the abstract or introduction and skim most of the piece, paying particular attention to sections that are directly related to your interests, than it is to scramble to fully read and digest everything at a quick pace. In research in particular, you may not know what’s useful from a paper when you first read it, but making its acquaintance and returning to it later after further reading can help you make the best use of your time, and help you pace yourself.

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