Uni Series : Reading Stratergies.

I do English Literature and Drama and Theatre Studies. That's safe to say I do a lot of reading from plays to novels, poetry and then journal articles to go with it. Currently for English we're expected to read ALOT and to have read it during summer. Unfortunately, I had a full time summer job and only managed to get the first terms reading done.

So now I'm stuck trying to read a lot of stuff I won't use for my essays or exam. Here's a few tips and how I'm doing it.

Selective Reading :
As the title says being selective with what you're going to read. Start by priotisising your reading, I do my seminar reading first then my tutorial as they're on a Tuesday for English then on my four day weekend I'll tackle the reading for my other seminar and some drama reading or if I've got an essay due soon and need to start reading for that. I'll do that reading first, because that's reading I'm going to get graded on after all. If I can't read the Dickens novel for my tutorials, I'll read a summary on sparknotes or shmoop or wikipedia (I know this is bad, but it's better than going to the seminar and not contributing cause you've no idea what's going on). Atleast this way I know some themes and can comment on them and contribute to the discussion. Nothing worse than awkward seminar silence. If I've more time during say a break or don't have enough time to read the book itself, I'll read a journal article so I can critically comment on the piece.

Skimming :
What I'm currently doing is skimming, I'm reading the first and last paragraph of every chapter and doing some close analysis so I have some notes on linguistic details, metaphors ect. But then filling in the gaps with chapter summaries from again spark notes, e-notes, shmoop and wikipedia. I simply don't have time to read two novels a week and poetry and then the journal articles as well. I'm dyslexic for god's sake and read at half the speed others do. So if I didn't do this I'd be screwed. This way even if I want to revisit the text I've got notes on those chapters and know what happens where. So I can just read that one chapter if I'm looking for a certain section to quote on in my essay or exam.

Abstracts  or Blurbs:
If you've been asked to read like 4 articles like I do a week and simply don't have time to sit and try and decipher the academic lexis then just read the abstract. Very short paragraph summarising the articles argument, very helpful when trying to find material for essays as well. At least in seminars you can contribute the argument as you've an idea of what the critic was saying rather than sitting there awkwardly.The back of a book when in the library trying to find relevant material. If an article dosen't have a abstract read the first paragraph which will be the introduction outlining the structure of the argument.

Scanning:
I do this when reading for essays. I look at my skimming notes and find the section I'm looking for by scanning the chapter until I find relevant words. It literally takes minuets over hours.This works really well for journal articles when trying to find key words. Just scan the page for a certain word or phrase and you'll hopefully find it.

Hope this helps,
Bekka.