These 2 pieces of advice for (student) readers came across my virtual desk:
- How to read a book, v5.0 by Paul N. Edwards, School of Information, University of Michigan
- Reading with purpose by Michael Newman, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, writing in University Affairs.
Both are making similar points.
Student readers of academic texts
As a teacher, these articles are gold.
They will help you address your students’ concerns about how much reading they are expected to do, AND your frustrations with what they are able to say even when they’ve done the reading.
And you don’t have to write a similar set of guidelines yourself. What a relief.
It’s not just students.
It’s easy to assume that only novice readers of academic texts need this advice. This is not true.
- You read like this.
- You recommend your students read like this.
- Your colleagues read like this.
When you publish in scholarly journals and books, this is the way the majority of readers will approach what you have written.
Someone else is reading what you write and publish in the way described in these guidelines.
Writing for readers
When you write your first draft, you are writing for yourself. To figure out what you want to say, whether you can say that, what evidence you need, etc. (See The Scholarly Writing Process)
As you revise your draft, you need to consider your audience. Not just who they are and what they know, but also how they read.
The guidelines for readers should definitely influence the following elements:
- introduction
- section headings
- abstract
- indexed items (for a book)
- keywords (for an article)
- Title and/or subtitle
Paying attention to how the introduction (and the bibliography) situate your argument in a broader intellectual context, and how much of that work is being done by the choice of publisher or journal, can help you make difficult revision decisions.
How does the guidelines provided in books like those linked at the beginning help you consciously thinking about these guidelines affect how to revise your draft?
Related Posts:
When does Reading count as Writing?
Experienced writers vs novice writers
This post has been substantially edited, February 2024.
The two documents are really excellent. Thank you for sharing them. I would be tempted to say that using Mind-Mapping or Concept-Mapping when following such guidelines could be a very useful addition.
I have been educated in the French secondary education system (Le Lycée), where “le plan” is almost a religion. Students are taught to systematically write to draft “plan detaillés” (detailed plans) as a practice for essay writing and the “plan avec trois parties and trois sous-parties” (plan with three parts and three-sub-sections) usually rules. When I started lecturing in Britain in the early 1990s it came as much of a surprise how very few students had any concept of doing detailed planning before starting the write their essays. In the French system, analyzing texts for the “commentaires de textes” (Text commentaries), goes hand in hand with writing essays. It is therefore very much part of the intellectual training to both analyse texts in terms of structure and argumentation on the one hand and on the other to structure your own text and develop an argumentation.
As a researcher, I tend to analyse important research articles or books, by mind-mapping them quite systematically, which involves analyzing both the structure and the argument. I have found that very useful as it encourages active and analytical reading. When I was still a prof at the University of Salford in Manchester, I introduced workshops for doctoral students on how to use Mind-Mapping for conducting literature reviews and participants usually found that extremely useful.
At present when I am preparing an article — and I am just bringing the finishing touch to my latest prepared in that way — I tend to start planning it as a Mind-Map, and when I actually start drafting it in text form, I keep going back and forth between the map and the draft text. This allows me to have at all times an overview of the structure of the article, which keeps evolving as I draft it.
In a sense, “How to read a book” becomes “How to plan a book” and “Reading with purpose becomes “Planning with purpose”.
Some people find plans and outlines work really well. Others not so much. Personally, I usually start with free-writing, then extract a plan, then revise to a plan. And there are a lot of other ways to do things. My approach is really to help people figure out what works for them. There is a point in the process where you have to identify who you are writing for and what they need to know. I worry that a lot of academic writing advice doesn’t actually account for the diversity of those potential readers and the fact that one piece will probably not reach more than one audience. But that is probably for another post (or so…).