Writing Practice 1

Reading as part of writing

One of the techniques of writing successfully in academic environment is to be able to integrate the important points of what you have read into your own writing. To do this, you must have a clear picture of what you have read, and this in itself entails active and focused reading. With academic reading, it is necessary to maintain a constant grip on what the author is saying. Yet many academic texts are densely written in unfamiliar ways, which make them much more difficult to manage than, for example a novel or a magazine article.

Although sometimes there may be reasons why you need to skim-read an article or book, this is likely to be only to get the gist of what is being said, as a way of deciding whether it is appropriate reading material or not. In general, skim-reading is not a particularly useful strategy for a student, but you may well be used to doing this in other contexts, for example, skimming through a newspaper article or surfing the web. Instead of skim-reading, you will be developing ways of concentrating on large chunks of quite dense text and making sense of them.

Even though you may only be reading for short burst of time, it is likely that you will have to concentrate far more intensely on academic reading material than, for example, when reading for pleasure. You don’t necessarily have to work in the library, but you will need to decide what type of location and atmosphere suits you best, and establish conditions that are conducive to effective study.

The initial stumbling block that most students face is choosing their reading. The first thing to do is to consult the reading list you have been given for books and articles that seem relevant to your particular assignment. Doing a library search, by keywords or subjects, is also useful if the references on your reading list are already on loan from the library. Your tutor should also be able to advise you as to which are the most relevant publications or websites.