We were so delighted to have a packed classroom for our first brown bag. Over 30 people showed up on a rainy Friday to explore effective reading strategies for graduate students. Prof Caleb McDaniel from History and Anthony Koth from Linguistics guided us through different approaches to maximize our production and minimize our labor time in our reading work. Thanks go out to both of them for volunteering their time and expertise.

To give a brief summary, Prof McDaniel explained that linear reading in the face of overwhelming volumes of writing just doesn’t work, for time or comprehension. Instead of speed reading, he recommends a method of smart reading or strategic reading, which centers around getting the lay of the land during pre-reading. By first paying careful attention to the cover, the title, and the table of contents–which most authors utilize to distill their argument as clearly as possible–the smart reader can notice key words and other sign-posts that will streamline the reading thereafter and help you track the author’s argument.

With a book, after annotating the table of contents, you can begin to skim, paying the most attention to chapter titles, headings, subheadings, introductory and concluding paragraphs and sentences, and picking out key words. A thorough reading of the introduction is also helpful before picking out the key passages of the book, to which you will thereafter devote most of your attention.

Identifying the conversation in which the work takes place is perhaps the most important thing when reading in graduate school. If the introduction does not do this clearly enough, checking citations and references in databases can help, as can reading reviews of the books–though one should be skeptical of the content analysis in the reviews. Review essays are particularly helpful.

Prof McDaniel has a helpful page on his website that provides more depth on his strategy. Some things are discipline specific, but humanities and social science scholars should find copious pearls of wisdom on it.

Anthony Koth emphasized the value of writing precis of everything you read, especially as it will be so helpful for writing, future research, and especially comps. We discussed how to minimize the need to re-read things.

Other topics covered were digital note taking and reference management software, which we hope to cover more thoroughly another time.

Thanks also go out to everyone who attended and helped in organizing the event.