How To Read An Academic Text
for the anon who asked about tips on how to read and grasp ideas more quickly and effectively in nonfiction articles and books, this is an exercise that one of my favorite professors in college always has his first-year history students do when learning how to read scholarly texts, and it seemed kind of juvenile and pointless at the time but in retrospect i think it was probably really helpful
before you start reading SKIM the text while searching for a few specific things (my prof had us highlight them in different colors which you may or may not find helpful. seems stupid but honestly helps if you’re struggling.)
main argument. look for this in the beginning and the end of the work. if the the text is written well, you should be able to highlight one (1) sentence in the intro that really encapsulates what the whole thing is about and the author should bring the reader back to a more nuanced reiteration of this argument in the conclusion. that’s the whole point of an introduction and a conclusion.
this is actually a lot more challenging than it seems like it will be and many passages might be masquerading as the main argument. especially if breaking down a text like this is new to you, often you’ll have to read the whole introduction and then go back and realize that this one idea is the central point that everything else is supporting, but it’s important to really know what the MAIN main argument the author is trying to make is as you properly read through the entire work, because this is what will guide you through the rest of the text.
context for this argument. in history, this is the historiography, but it will be called different things in different fields. basically, what is the context in which the author is making this argument? what is the existing body of knowledge that they are establishing themselves as a part of and what other ideas are they in conversation with? what is the angle that they’re using to approach their specific argument or research question?
in history articles or books, this will often be a whole section of the introduction where the author explicitly references previous scholarship and arguments other people have made in the past. this is helpful because it can let you know if you have the requisite background knowledge to properly engage with this author’s new argument, and if you don’t it gives you other works that you should look into to build up that contextual understanding. more importantly though, it enables you to understand how the author has positioned themself within the field, which, along with just doing your research about the author outside the text, can help you understand their overall perspective and potential biases, which you should always keep in mind as you read any argument.
once you do a lot of reading in a specific field, you’ll start to see the same basic ideas referenced in many texts, and this is what we mean by historiography. this is the body of scholarly work that makes up a field of study, and this is what you should aim to have an understanding of in order to really understand where new arguments sit within them. we call that last part the intervention — what is this person trying to say that hasn’t already been said before? why is their idea new and interesting?
sidenote: it can be helpful as you’re doing this to make a note of key concepts/terms or definitions that the author introduces that you may or may not understand. sometimes especially if they are new terms in the field, they will be a part of the author’s intervention/main argument, but sometimes they’re just specialized terms that are already commonly used in the scholarship. so accordingly, sometimes these concepts will be defined in the text but other times it will be assumed that you will understand them because they are part of the already established lexicon in the field (in which case, simply make a note of it to look up later, but try not to get too bogged down in this in your initial reading if possible). either way, this is not part of the main exercise of breaking down a text, but it can be extremely helpful and is also how you build up your own vocabulary of specialized terms and concepts as you get to know the subject better
sequence of smaller arguments/points that build up to their main argument. in a book this is often easily delineated into the individual chapters of the book so you will be able to get a general idea of it through the table of contents, but a lot of the introductory chapter should just be the author going through each of the subsequent chapters and laying out what they are going to say and how it supports their main argument.
honestly, scholarly texts are incredibly formulaic because it’s not about flowery writing, it’s about making your argument clear and supporting it well. so once you figure out what these signposts usually look like and where to look out for them in texts as you’re reading, the process of reading will get much easier. you should already have your prebuilt formula in your mind because you know how every single text is structured, then with your initial skim fill in the blanks to that formula with the specific arguments introduced in this one, then you can proceed knowing that everything else in the text that you will read only serves to support that.
you can also do this same process for each of those chapters and build out an outline for yourself of each one to guide you through as you read. you should know the main point of the chapter going in from your overview of the book as a whole, but before you start reading the chapter it’s helpful to skim through and look for any headings to have a map of how the author will make that point.
as you are doing this, it can help to take very very brief notes—do NOT get bogged down in the details because it’s very easy to do that once you start taking notes, but just skim the chapter/article/book beforehand and physically write out an outline of the sequence of points the author is going to make so you can refer to this map as you actually work through the text. (again, if the text is well written, the author should have made this clear; usually it’s just the chapter titles and section headings so you should be able to easily pick them out as you skim)
basically, this is the process of writing an academic/nonfiction text but in reverse. you’re breaking the text down into its skeleton so you can have a clear idea of how the author has structured their argument, and you can always refer back to this as you read if you find yourself getting lost.
think about how you first learned to write a 5-paragraph essay in elementary school: introduction + 3 body paragraphs + conclusion. hamburger with two buns and lettuce/tomato/burger in the middle. look for topic sentences and supporting evidence; break larger passages down in to what role each individual part of it is meant to play. you should always view each of these parts as supporting the work as whole, and should remind yourself of that in order to discern what is actually important to take away from the text vs. what is relatively unimportant / there for support only.
it’s easy to get lost or bogged down in wordy writing and complex ideas, but if you know that THIS sentence is the argument and this next sentence only exists to support that argument, you will always be able to find your way back to the underlying structure that the text is built around. as you’re reading, you know should always know where you’re going and how the author is planning to get you there.
it may seem like a lot of extra work to skim a text and write out an outline before you even start properly Reading, but trust me it makes things much easier in the long run and you will get much more out of your readings. honestly my professors would tell me that you only really have to read the introduction (+ table of contents), and the conclusion to understand get the main point of what an author is trying to say, and only if you really want to get into the weeds of their specific primary evidence then you should go through the other chapters.
in a scientific research paper it’s even clearer. it’s literally: abstract + introduction (incl. literature review) + methods + results + discussion + conclusion (sometimes included in discussion). explicitly the same structure every time, and each section will have a heading in bold. when reading scientific papers for general knowledge, unless you really want to get into the weeds, you often just read the abstract + introduction then skip to the discussion, and refer mainly to the figures to quickly guide you through the key points of the methods and results.
remember that reading a work of nonfiction, if you really want to actually understand and internalize new knowledge from it, should not be the same process as reading a novel. it’s not a journey where you’re along for the ride where the mystery of how it’s going to end is the fun of it. you shouldn’t worry about skipping to the end for fear of spoilers. you WANT the lay of the land before you start so you can better understand not only 1) the points the author is trying to make but also, when you go back to properly read more closely, 2) the between-the-lines of WHY they are making those points and how they are constructing their arguments, what they might be leaving out, and where their biases might be.
also, in academic texts, the conclusion should be perfectly comprehensible without having read through the rest of the chapters; there are no plot twists or climactic moments, or at least there shouldn’t be, given the author should have presented the main argument upfront. reading the conclusion first can help give you an idea of how the author claims they will convince you of their argument in the preceding chapters, so knowing that you can have an idea of what to look out for when you go back and see if they have laid out the support for that argument successfully.
i know this explanation is way longer than it needed to be, especially for a process that really is quite straightforward, but hopefully some people find it helpful. remember: find the main argument, contextualize the text in the larger body of knowledge, break down the rest of the text into its basic structure that should all lead back to that main argument. read the rest of the text to see if the author succeeded in effectively convinced you of that argument.
further useful resources on How To Read:
How to Read in College by Timothy Burke, Swarthmore College
How to read a (good) book in one hour by Christopher Kelty, UCLA
How to Read for History by W. Caleb McDaniel, Rice University
How to Read a Book by Paul Edwards, University of Michigan
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