Take My Advice: Reading Strategies

A bookshelf with three stacks of semi-organized books: left, for class; middle, for research; right, to return. I'm very proud.

I've talked before about how embracing the idea that there are many different ways to start writing, to begin a project, and to write well and consistently can be really useful when teaching. What works for you may not work for others. I recently had occasion to think about how this is true for reading as well.

Reading for classes is a different beast than reading for pleasure, and sometimes this truth can make it hard to get started on reading, or to sustain interest in it. Not only is it specific-- you must read this, not that-- but it's also a different process, one which calls for breaking down language and ideas to fully understand and use them. This is also a process that becomes more critical as one shifts from survey-level undergraduate courses to more discussion-heavy upper-level seminars, where the reading gets longer, more dense, and more deeply discussed during class, as well as plumbed for use in papers.

Like the writing strategies I mentioned in that earlier post, reading strategies can often be presented as a set of maxims, but also like writing advice, they don't have to be used in that way. They can simply offer another set of options for someone to choose from when they sit down to do coursework. Here's a few I like-- I'd love to hear yours in comments. 

Getting Started 

Sometimes the hardest part of reading is actually starting to do it. If a stack of text seems as though it will have no end, there can be little motivation for beginning. Here are a couple of helpful tricks to overcome this:

Throwing yourself in. 

I worked with someone once who worked many more hours than me at a job that I loved, but found very draining. I asked him how he could stand getting up every morning and going, and he told me he just had to not think about it-- to throw himself out of bed, into the shower, and out the door without contemplating what his day would hold, or else it would become overwhelming. This, I think, is especially applicable to reading. If you are afraid to start, just start. Take your book to the pool or to a comfy chair in the park. Don't worry about the notes, the perfect pencil, the right lighting level on your monitor. Just jump in and worry about all of the accoutrements later-- after you have an idea of what the text is about. 

Time based goals.  

If you have to read a certain number of pages, it can be tempting to just say "well, my goal is that number of pages." But for a long reading that might be too much for one session of reading, and it may be counterproductive to fully read all of those pages anyway. Try setting a goal of reading for an hour, or limiting the total amount of time you can spend on  reading for one course to three hours that week. Then when that time is up, evaluate how well that worked. Did you complete everything? Did you get the gist of what the text was about, and a few specifics to back it up? Are there ways you could improve your reading efficiency and get more out of these texts?

Study/reading groups. 

These can be really useful whether everyone is reading the same thing or not—if you invite people over or do a Google hangout get-together in which everyone reads for an hour or so, it can be motivating. Not only does it carry the promise of socializing before or after, if that appeals to you, it also has the benefit of social pressure-- "Everyone else is reading! Why aren't I reading? I should read and not look at my phone." (Citation: Me, on "Why I Do a Lot of Work at Coffee Shops.")
 

How-To's

Just as reading strategies are options you can use or not use to help your own learning process, I like to think of the act of reading as giving yourself options for the future in the form of information, arguments, and evidence for future papers, projects, etcetera-- similar to my thoughts on giving yourself gifts. When there are pages and pages to go before you can say "done," its easy to get bogged down.  But if you focus on looking for specific information about the text, it can ease this reading process. Starting to read a text is then less “I must slog through this text and complete it” and more “I will use this text as a tool to find these answers.”  
 
Focusing on concrete methods for reading can really help. 4 Steps to Reading a Textbook offers some advice for intro-level classes. The argument presented here that one should start with the questions at the back is a compelling one-- it gives you a goal to clearly pursue. Upper-level courses can benefit from concrete advice about reading selectively as well. In this piece on How to Read for History, I especially like the first section because it doesn’t just say “skim,” it suggests specific strategies for dragging a lot of info out of skimming a text’s title, chapters, and sections; and looking for particular sentence structures and placements which indicate key points. Another skimming strategy I sometimes use: the first and last sentence of every paragraph.

What other particulars might we look for? Academic Reading Strategies not only offers a few general reading tips that can be useful; it also suggests that having an idea of purpose (why you’re reading and why the author is writing) can be a good place to start, which I think is related to this idea of using the text as a tool. I also particularly like a handout that Tamara Chaplin used when I TA'd for her (my very first teaching experience!), which included the following outline: 

Level One

• Who wrote this document?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What is the story line?

Level Two

• Why was this document written?
• What type of document is this?
• What are the basic assumptions made in this document?

Level Three

• Do I believe this document?
• What can I learn about the society that produced this document?
• What does this document mean to me?

Switching It Up

Some people have one method and stick to it. The people who are in the business of giving mandates about studying tend to smile upon this method. "Find a method and stick to it," they say. "This is the key to success in college."

I personally tend to be a bit more variable, and really always have been. I work best when I switch between a variety of settings-- from office to home to coffee shop-- and change up the format of my reading depending upon the form of the text and the significance to whatever I'm doing. I might take detailed notes in a separate document for one article, and scribble notes and underlines in the margins of another. I might read one on my Kindle in the park and one at the library with a pen. Don't be afraid to change tactics if you find yourself distressed or bored by the one you're doing.

For especially difficult times, you might find that varying the method of intake may help break down the challenging wall between you and the text. You might find that listening to a work can be easier than sitting down to read it. It is a bit harder to get the details this way, but not so bad for getting the gist. Many PDFs have searchable text, which means they can be read by a screen reader or other text-to-speech tool like TTSReader. These are not always perfect (ever hear this thing read a footnote?), but they can be a way to get through a reading block.  Some course books can be found as audiobooks, or you can find some authors talking about their books on podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, which can help you get some of the main ideas. This is not a replacement for reading the text-- an audiobook won't help you when you have to cite page numbers in a paper; a podcast summary will be relatively unhelpful if your instructor really wants to talk about chapter 3 in detail-- but it can be a way to jump-start your reading, fill in gaps on stressful weeks, or allow you to engage in a discussion that you might not have attended otherwise. 

What reading strategies do you use or recommend? I'm always looking for more options.

Current Project: Time Travel and Crucible Critique

A shot of the original production of The Crucible, from playbill.com.

It's Week 2 of the semester, and History 365 is now in full swing. In this course, in addition to seminar style discussions, weekly response papers, and a final project, I'm using various creative projects to encourage students to make connections between the historical fictions we're reading and other primary and secondary sources of the eras under study. Today I debuted an activity which asks students to step into one of three perspectives and work together to argue about The Crucible's relevance to the experiences of their group. 

How do you solve a problem like Arthur Miller? 

I have to admit that I was stuck on what to do with The Crucible for a while. I knew that I wanted to include it as a starting point for our discussion of witchcraft and religion in colonial New England, as so many people's ideas about the topic and the period are already informed by the work. I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to read and discuss it in class, so that we would all have a basis for understanding this influential portrayal of the Salem trials. I knew also that it was long enough that it would be difficult to pair with the longer companion texts in the section for a comparative discussion-- I didn't want to have it due the same day as Escaping Salem or The Witch so that we could compare the two immediately. It would not only be more reading than was reasonable for one day but also rush the discussion of both, leaving us little time to get to some of the smaller details. It would have to be the subject of a few days of discussion before getting to these newer texts.

Knowing this was the case, I still couldn't figure out what to do with The Crucible. As performance of a theatrical work can be an important part of its interpretation, I toyed with the idea of having students produce scenes from the work, with one as a dramaturg, one as a director, some as actors, etcetera. Perhaps pairing it with a performance of a HUAC trial transcript. But although I could see the potential value of doing this, I couldn't see my way into or out of it-- I couldn't make it make sense for this class and the kind of intellectual engagement with the text I wanted to encourage. 

I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in under half an hour for once when the solution finally came to me, as these things so often do. I had assigned the Christopher Bigsby introduction to the Penguin edition for the week before the actual play was due, and when I went back to consider it again I found a great deal which seemed delightfully questionable. No statement was so ripe for critique as that which came near the end of the piece, in which Bigsby claims that "the play's success now owes little to the political and social context in which it was written." Such a claim echoes the widespread interest in declaring this particular work as well as most other well-regarded literature as somehow good because they capture a universal humanity, a transcendence of context. How could I encourage students to avoid this mentality, which sounds very nice but is useless for an appreciation of history? 

The Project: Time-Travelers and The Crucible

The conceit of the project I ended up designing is this:

In a mysterious and poetic quirk of fate, two groups of 1690s Puritans from Salem, Massachusetts AND two groups of Hollywood writers targeted by HUAC in the 1940s and 50s have been transported forward in time to the modern day. As coincidence would have it, they have landed in the midst of a conference of historians of race and gender who are analyzing The Crucible. In this project, you and your group will analyze Miller’s play in light of your particular viewpoint and come up with a plan to present your experiences to one another and to the curious world in a press conference. 

In this project, students are in one of six groups. (For a smaller class, three could easily be used-- my class is too big to have only three groups).

• Groups 1 and 2: 1690s Puritans who lived through the trials. They are tasked with answering the question: Does this play reflect our experience and values?
• Groups 3 and 4: Targets of HUAC in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. They investigate whether this play speaks to their experiences as suspected Hollywood Communists.
• Groups 5 and 6: Modern day historians of race and gender. They have a more removed task, contemplating whether Miller’s play is more reflective of 1690’s ideas on race and gender, 1950s ideas of race and gender, or some combination of the two. 

Each group confers with one another to consider Miller's work in relation to "their" experiences and interests. They create a 5-7 minute presentation, using evidence from the play and other sources provided, such as lecture, primary documents such as selections from Puritan sermons and HUAC trial transcripts, and secondary literature. They took the class period to work on this, and are free (but not required) to work on this outside of class as well. On Friday, they will present their conclusions to the group. 

Project sheets and rubric are here. 

Reflections

I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the class has taken to the activity so far. I was a bit worried it would be confusing and I would get a lot of questions about the details of the project. In reality, many of the questions I got were complex historical ones about relationships between ideologies and actions in the Puritan context. From observations I made walking around the room, most of the class seemed to come to the questions and ideas I wanted to encourage, considering issues of race, religion, gender, enslavement, historical interpretation, and the nature of experience in relation to the texts. The questions and arguments raised in this section will serve as a nice platform to build upon for the final week of inquiry into the mythological role that Salem and the concept of colonial witchcraft trials have played in US historical memory. 

Related Links:

Some of the sources I provided include the HUAC transcripts of Paul Robeson and John Howard Lawson; Gretchen Adams, "The Specter of Salem in American Culture," from the OAH Magazine of History, July 2003; and selections of John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charity; "Regulating Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies," from Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality; Elaine Breslaw's Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem; Steven J. Ross, Movies and American Society.