Thought Piece for "Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources"

I couldn’t tell you how many times I have fallen asleep trying to read something for a class. Often, I fall asleep reading books that I really enjoy, too, even if it is mostly because I end up staying up till 3 or 4 in the morning reading them.

I wonder how many people went back and reread this with the principles presented in it in mind. It has all of the parts it said to look through: an introduction, section headings, and a conclusion. I know that I went back and went through the whole thing again. The first time I read it, I had no idea what it would be about. I was trying to make sense of it, and it didn’t work to well. When I finally got to the “Strategies for Rhetorical Reading” section it finally started to sink in, and that was only like half way through the article. After reading the whole thing, I was like, “You know, this probably applies to this article, too.” So I went back and looked at all of the major parts of it (the section headings, intro, and conclusion), and the whole article made more sense already. I looked at the section headings to see what was important. The section headings in this article: “The Title”, “The introduction”, “Section Headings”, and “Conclusion”. All of the most important things of the article. Of course, the body is important too, but if you are just trying to figure out what it is about, these things are what you would want to look at. Overall, this is actually a very good way of approaching reading. I will definitely be using this strategy more in the future.

One thing I didn’t know before I read this was that you are supposed to figure out what the intended audience for the article is. In retrospect, it is actually a really good idea. It doesn’t make sense to read an article from a scientific journal and expect it to be general-reader friendly. It has all of the technical details, all of the “how it works.” General readers tend to just care if it works at all, not how. Thus, they would be less interested in the how. And realizing that does some strange thing with the human psychology, and it becomes easier to understand after that. It’s crazy I know, but somehow it makes more sense.

The whole thing about scholarly articles not trying to draw you in kind of makes sense. Scholarly articles are there for those who need the bare facts. They need to find out what they are looking for, and find it fast. They don’t need the fluff that a lot of other sources put into their articles. Their purpose is to inform, and in great depth. To do that and keep it interesting would require an entire book, not just an article.