Your course readings are a key source for developing expertise in your disciplinary field.
Get in the habit of reading the footnotes and endnotes to track down citational leads and contextual discussion important to your topic.
The reading guide, “How to Read Journal Articles Like a Professor,” prepared by Michael J. Nelson, Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies at Penn University, offers the following:
Any time you sit down to read in graduate school, the first thing you need to do is to clarify your purpose for reading. This affects how closely you read the paper, where you focus your reading efforts, and even where you start reading the paper. There are kinds of reading:
Reading for substance
The goal is to understand “what is the main idea of this paper?” Focus on a paper’s intellectual contribution: What do we know now from this paper that we didn’t know before?
Reading as a researcher
This is the type of reading that you want to become skillful at in graduate school. The goal is to evaluate the research and determine “is this research convincing?” This is a higher-level skill than reading for substance. But, you have to read for substance (know what the paper is trying to say) before you can read it as a researcher (evaluate whether the paper is convincing).
Reading as a writer
This is the type of reading necessary to understand how the author has conveyed their ideas and findings. This is not generally the type of reading you need to do for a weekly graduate seminar. But this is necessary when you start producing research. Academic writing is a genre. As you begin to write your own research, it can be helpful to emulate articles that you have found successful. Understanding the construction of successful journal articles can help you figure out how to piece together your own research into an article format that is both comprehensible and convincing to readers.
As you read, consider the following Strategies for Engaging with Course Readings developed by Dr. Jonathan Rosa, Professor at Stanford University. Applying these concrete strategies will help you prepare for seminar discussions, prepare annotated bibliographies for readings, and build your expertise.
1. At the beginning of every grad seminar, I suggest a few reading strategies for the social sciences: Before picking up a text, learn something about the author & where this piece fits into their broader body of work to get a sense of key stakes, themes, & trajectories.
2. Study the placement of a reading on the syllabus to get a sense of the overarching topics & concepts for the week, as well as those that precede and follow it—this can help you to *bring questions to the reading.*
3. Identify the genre & scope of the text to figure out the amount of time & mode of engagement necessary to make productive meaning of it based on your particular reading habits & the goals of the course.
4. Read strategically—not necessarily sequentially—based on genre & partitioning; with social sciences texts, it’s often helpful to begin by reading the abstract/intro & discussion/conclusion, & then as much of the body of the text as possible, focusing on key themes.
5. After identifying key themes for the week & the structure of the text, strategically focus on the most relevant sections & chapters—to the extent possible, identify those in advance & read them first.
6. Rather than narrowly focusing on *the* argument, begin by identifying *an* argument that resonates with you & your work, & dissect that argument: whose work is it building on or challenging, with what evidence, logics, & stakes?
7. The more time you have to engage with a text, the more questions you can consider: What is the intended audience for this work, how is that reflected in it, & with what conceits? Are the evidence & methods employed effective for the advancement of the author’s argument?
8. Critical reading dovetails with critical note-taking & reflective writing—doctoral students in particular should use written annotations & reflections not simply to summarize, but rather to recontextualize readings in relation to *your* emerging research agenda.
9. Finally, my most important advice: Reading is often mistakenly assumed to be a passive practice rather than an active dialogue among readers, texts, authors, & their worlds—take authors seriously on their own terms but also take yourself seriously as a reader & researcher.
10. One more thing: The broader point is that “doing the reading” isn’t simply reading every word or page, which is often unnecessary, unproductive, & unsustainable. In fact, it’s quite beautiful & inspiring to observe the infinite forms that meaningful textual engagement can take!