Academic Reading

I'm holding a lecture this morning about reading. What I'm going to try to do is to apply the advice I give for writing to the act of reading. I'm going to argue that just as we should be writing on a schedule, we should be reading on one too. Of course, there will be plenty of times when we read for pleasure, and this will not be the focus of my concern. What I'm going to talk about is those moments (every day) when we join the intended audience of an academic text.

Academic writing communicates the ideas of knowledgeable people to other knowledgeable people. When you are reading academically, therefore, you are confronting a text with what you know (not what you don't know); and you are confronting your knowledge (not your ignorance) with a text. I often cite Wayne Booth's description of the Oxford seminars where the only questions that are put to a text are "What does the author mean?" and "How does the author know?" These are certainly useful guides. And they are useful because they identify the epistemic content of a text and get you to notice the way the text is (hopefully) structured into paragraphs, which is to say, sequences of claims and support for those claims. Each paragraph announces a meaning (a claim) and tells you how the writer knows (support).

As always, the lecture will include a great deal of practical advice about how to structure your time. My interest here is actually in defending the writing process from reading just as much as it is in providing a stable basis for the writing. It is true that you need to read in order to become a good writer. But it is not true that you need to read before you write. Your writing is just your way of keeping yourself articulate about what you know. In your reading, you confront that knowledge with the articulateness of someone else.