It is you, the reader, who makes sense of what you read and the meaning that you will be able to make depends to some extent on how you are reading. We have already illustrated a method of ‘global reading’, and below we look at two more ways of ‘making meaning through reading’ and how you may use these when preparing for your assignments. There are likely to be different reasons for the reading you do for your studies at university. You may be reading as background to your course and seminars, to supplement and elaborate on what you have been taught. You may be reading around a subject that you are thinking of writing about but you feel that you need more information before you can decide if you will be confident in writing an assignment in this area.
More commonly, you will be reading to complete a particular assignment.
Figure 5.3 Reference card
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We are concerned with the latter kind of reading in the two tasks that follow (although we hope that these strategies will be useful to you whatever the purpose of your reading).
‘Fitting together’ reading
Approaching your reading so that everything that you are reading and study- ing fits together helps you to focus on your ideas, and both to synthesize and elaborate them. To help you with what we call ‘fitting together’ reading, try to answer the following questions as you both read and take notes for your reading:
• How does this material relate to what I already know about the subject?
• How does this material relate to other sources on the same subject?
• What related arguments or theories does this reading make me think of?
• How could I use what I am reading in my assignment?
• How could I use this in conjunction with the ideas that I already have on this subject?
• What do I need to add to use this reading constructively in my assignment?
• What do I need to leave out to use this material constructively in my assignment?
You may find it useful to look back to Chapter 4, to the section on ‘Analysing the assignment’, to see how you might set about answering some of these questions. In fact, analysing the assignment title and ‘fitting together’ reading are interrelated ways of approaching written assignments. As you read and take notes for your assignment you are working through your analysis of the title and taking from your reading the most appropriate material for your own work.
‘Analytic’ reading
This is less concerned with reading to fit together with what you know already than with analysing what you are reading as you go along. Again, this is an integral part of the strategy that you will need to adopt to read successfully for your writing. To make the most of analytic reading, these are the sorts of question that you will need to be asking:
• How does the author introduce the text?
• Does she spell out what she is going to talk about?
• What do you think that this author is saying?
• Is the author assuming that you have a particular background knowledge?
• Can you pick out the central thesis or idea of the chapter, book or article?
• Can you understand the different parts of the text and how they all fit together?
• What sort of evidence does the author use to support her argument?
• Does her argument seem biased or one-sided in any way?
• Does her argument seem logical?
• Can you pick out the themes that she uses to support her argument?
• Does her conclusion follow from what she has said or are there some new ideas here?
Activity Fourteen: Trying out different reading strategies
Choose something that you need to read for one of your assignments. Work through the questions above for ‘fitting together’ reading and ‘analytic’
reading. Can you identify which kind of reading seems most useful for you at this stage of writing your assignment? You might find that they are equally important.
As we said before, the important thing to remember about reading is that you, the reader, are active in making meaning from what you read. Making sense of what you read is your responsibility, but unfortunately you will find that some academic books and articles are written in ways that make it very difficult for the reader to unpack what the author is trying to convey. We have been emphasizing that the understanding that you get from the text depends to some extent on your own ways of reading. The approaches that we illustrate above are not necessarily kept separate when you are reading. You may well be adopting both at the same time, in a sense reading at a number of different levels simultaneously. You may be reading for very specific information about a topic or subject matter. In that case, you may need to pay particular attention to factual information – for example, dates, names or places. On the other hand, you may be reading to understand much more generally a particular theoretical position – for example, what one psychologist says about child development, as opposed to what another author says about the same thing.
In this case, as you read, you will be both analysing the ideas of the author you are reading and comparing them with what you already know. You may be reading a novel or a poem and will therefore be concerned most with interpreting it from your own understanding and perspective.
However you are reading, try to pay attention to the ways in which the author has put the text together:
• If he uses quotes, why has he used them and how has he integrated them into the text?
• If graphs or tables are used how do they fit together? How are these referred to in the text so that the reader knows when to look at them?
• How do different authors reference other sources or use footnotes?
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You can use this knowledge when you come to do your own writing. One of the most difficult things about academic writing is incorporating all the different bits and pieces of what you want to say. As we have said, if you pay attention to the work of the authors that you are reading, you will begin to get a flavour of how to do the same things in your own writing.
Pay particular attention to how quotes are used. In student writing it is easy for quotes to stick out like a sore thumb. They need to fit in with the general flow of the text, but how they are used can depend very much on the subject area in which you are writing. It is best to use a quote to support (with references) what you have said or are intending to say. It is unwise to let the quote do the work for you. A quote is always somebody else’s words and it is more interesting for the reader to read what you have to say rather than a series of quotes interspersed by your words. Thinking about this while you are reading for your studies will help you to get an idea of how to use quotes or cite evidence for yourself. We discuss this in more detail in Chapter 8.