The comments here remind me a little of Pierre Bayard's delightful(ly) postmodern monograph, _How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read_ [0].<p>It's an entertaining read.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read-ebook/dp/B0049U444U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read-ebook/dp/...</a>
I don't really find his initial assertion correct at all:<p>> Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion.<p>I took a chembio and CS bachelors degree at an expensive private institution and a software development masters at a large public institution and read all assigned reading quite easily. Actually, I'd usually read all the textbooks before the semester even started.<p>That said, I do find his speed reading methods useful. I'd usually speed read the book a couple times first before reading entirely through, and speed read the relevant chapter before any exam. If you only read the reading material once through, you are doing something wrong, since that isn't the way to memorize it.
Good advice. I recently took the GRE exam (required for Grad School admissions in the US) and this article mirrors the advice almost all books (including the official guide) prescribe. When reading dense academic literature, you want to read actively and have an eye for detail, but at the same time, you don't want to get stuck on a particularly complicated sentence. You want to quickly gather up a few important things:<p>1. Context<p>2. Main Idea<p>3. Tone<p>4. Assumptions<p>5. Implications<p>6. Conclusion<p>7. Intent of Author
It wasn't till after I graduated that I started to realize the enormous volume of books arts majors had to read. And I don't understand why their information is presented in such an inconvenient format.<p>If the book is making an argument with a lot of discrete points and interconnections. Why isn't it a diagram or some kind of interactive hyperlinking thing? Why don't the individual points at least have a box around them so you can separate them visually from the other stuff without having to actually read it all?<p>Arts text books and essays just don't make sense to me. I can understand text format if it gives the reader motivation to understand that a soul-less diagram might not, but it sounds like most of this writing doesn't do that either. So I guess my question is, is this information really too complex to structure in an obvious way, or are the authors too lazy to design such a structure, or is it simply an ingrained culture that nobody can break free of?
I can't tell if this is a prank.<p>A post on "How to Read in College" targeted at college age students who (paraphrased) <i>"can't possibly read everything assigned to them"</i> goes over...3000 words without even an overview?<p>He then adds nonsense disclaimers, buried at the end. This post is hopeless.
Stopped reading at<p><i>The first rule, in some ways the only rule, is skim, skim, skim.</i><p>Nonsense, try to do that in a mathematical text and you understand literally nothing anymore. This might work for lightweight texts, not densely written heavily mathematical and algorithmic texts. Maybe that works if you're studying something like literature and don't need to understand complex things afterwards.<p>EDIT: He's a professor of history. I am not surprised.<p>EDIT2: brudgers is right, the professor wrote like 2000 words later that none of his advice applies to the situation I mentioned. I think he should have clarified that in the beginning instead of the end of the post. Introducing a rule as universal and introducing exceptions much later is not a good practice.