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0 pointsjacobolus10y ago0 comments

This guy is a history professor. A history student at a school of Swarthmore caliber who has e.g. two upper division history courses plus one course in a related field like philosophy/political science/sociology/cultural criticism and maybe one physical science course or something to satisfy some general ed requirements is going to be assigned something like 1000+ pages per week of reading, in addition to a substantial amount of writing and whatever work that science course requires, and of course time spent in lectures and discussions.

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.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

wyclif10y ago· 2 in thread

I don't mean for this to be a "you kids get off my lawn" type comment, but back in my day 1000+ pages/wk was not unusual. But this rarely meant reading every word; the ability to summarise and skim is crucial to how easily you read that many pages:

http://londoninternational-blog.com/2014/01/10/1000-pages-pe...

At least the '1000 page rule' seemed to be the expectation if you were, like me, a humanities student at a private university in the US or UK in the days of yore.

eitally10y ago

It was the same for me (UVA, BA double major in History & Religious Studies, '99).

cdcarter10y ago

That's exactly why this is an article on summarizing and skimming techniques!

caminante10y ago· 2 in thread

No. 3000 words is unnecessary for his argument and 10-15 min. of discretionary time is material. Partially to blame, and as another poster pointed out, the article was lifted from a text and maybe not packaged for a blog chunk.

With that, the author spends 2800 words to offer guidance on topics among which <when to look up words in the dictionary> (really! that's a section in his post!) and then tops it off with two awful disclaimers that his advice to skim critically gets trumped if 1. you're taking a class requiring full apprehension and/or 2. your prof. has exacting standards.

I don't think a Swarthmore-caliber™ student needs a reminder on any of the above, let alone to hear this mess in 3000+ words. It's as simple as prioritizing your time across grades, interests, learning, etc. Priorities differ and depending on your goals, you can be expected to read/study/analyze 25+ hours a week for any given subject -- not just the "non-social sciences."

jacobolusOP10y ago

If you had already internalized the advice in this article, you would have spent 2 minutes glancing through the post to decide it wasn’t relevant to your needs, and you wouldn’t have wasted 15 minutes reading it or another 30 minutes arguing about whether it was too wordy on a forum for computer programmers.

On the other hand, since you seem not to have previously learned the lessons this post is trying to teach, spending 15 minutes thinking about the argument and then applying what you learn whenever you need to skim in the future could save you many thousands of hours. Perhaps you should be writing to the author to thank him!

Cheers.

caminante10y ago

Sorry, I'm not following your ad hominem nor how its related to the thread.

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