A post on "How to Read in College" targeted at college age students who (paraphrased) "can't possibly read everything assigned to them" goes over...3000 words without even an overview?
He then adds nonsense disclaimers, buried at the end. This post is hopeless.
his disclaimers are hot garbage though. "NONE of this advice applies ... if you’re otherwise operating in a discipline where close reading is centrally important to the way the discipline thinks" and goes on to say "my advice is most useful in ... literary or cultural criticism" - derrida would like to have a word with you about how you think literary criticism doesn't involve close reading
disclaimer: i skimmed the article
If the student tries to read everything carefully at a leisurely pace, that’s going to take 25+ hours a week of just reading.
History students can’t afford the time to read everything line by line. They need to learn to skim, track the structure of the argument, figure out which bits are fluff and skip over those, and then focus down on the tricky sections.
It’s not that close reading isn’t also important in those fields (it absolutely is!), but not everything can be read closely.
To the grandparent poster: 3000 words is peanuts compared to the kind of reading loads this professor is talking about.
Yeah, but no intelligent person would like to have a word with Derrida...
That's significant, let alone the fact you're taking a chance ROI-wise by reading a random blog. Furthermore, asking "Can you?" is different than "Should you?" I'm hitting on the latter.
> Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion.
I took a chembio and CS bachelors degree at an expensive private institution and a software development masters at a large public institution and read all assigned reading quite easily. Actually, I'd usually read all the textbooks before the semester even started.
That said, I do find his speed reading methods useful. I'd usually speed read the book a couple times first before reading entirely through, and speed read the relevant chapter before any exam. If you only read the reading material once through, you are doing something wrong, since that isn't the way to memorize it.
> any normal fashion
>Actually, I'd usually read all the textbooks before the semester even started.
Check your logic
edit: TL's the youtube ad guy who claims he can teach you how to read ANY book in 10min.
It has also spawned plenty of parodies :)
If the book is making an argument with a lot of discrete points and interconnections. Why isn't it a diagram or some kind of interactive hyperlinking thing? Why don't the individual points at least have a box around them so you can separate them visually from the other stuff without having to actually read it all?
Arts text books and essays just don't make sense to me. I can understand text format if it gives the reader motivation to understand that a soul-less diagram might not, but it sounds like most of this writing doesn't do that either. So I guess my question is, is this information really too complex to structure in an obvious way, or are the authors too lazy to design such a structure, or is it simply an ingrained culture that nobody can break free of?
Consider that a command-line interface is an extremely inconvenient way for most people to use a computer but perfectly natural for others.
The first rule, in some ways the only rule, is skim, skim, skim.
Nonsense, try to do that in a mathematical text and you understand literally nothing anymore. This might work for lightweight texts, not densely written heavily mathematical and algorithmic texts. Maybe that works if you're studying something like literature and don't need to understand complex things afterwards.
EDIT: He's a professor of history. I am not surprised.
EDIT2: brudgers is right, the professor wrote like 2000 words later that none of his advice applies to the situation I mentioned. I think he should have clarified that in the beginning instead of the end of the post. Introducing a rule as universal and introducing exceptions much later is not a good practice.
It's an entertaining read.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read-ebook/dp/...
1. Context
2. Main Idea
3. Tone
4. Assumptions
5. Implications
6. Conclusion
7. Intent of Author
