Read this article: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/reading.html
The following text is from the above link:
“Staying Afloat: Some Scattered Suggestions on Reading in College
The first thing you should know about reading in college is that it bears little or no resemblance to the sort of reading you do for pleasure, or for your own edification.
Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion.
We know it, at least most of us do. You have to make strategic decisions about what to read and how to read it. You’re reading for particular reasons: to get background on important issues, to illuminate some of the central issues in a single session of one course, to raise questions for discussion. That calls for a certain kind of smash-and-grab approach to reading.You can’t afford to dilly-dally and stop to smell the lilies. You might not think that’s the ideal way to learn, and I would sort of agree. But on the professiorial side of things, we feel a real obligation to cover a particular field of knowledge in the course of a semester, and we can’t do it all through lectures. Nor would I personally want to talk at my students day in and day out.
So okay, if you’re not going to read everything with intense precision and in gory detail, then how are yougoing to read it? What I hope to provide in the following page is a few of the Stupid Academic Tricks [tm] about reading that I’ve learned over the years. These aren’t foolproof–they won’t work for everyone. They all take a while to master, through trial and error. This ain’t Cliff’s Notes here.
SKIMMING FOR ARGUMENTS: INTRODUCTIONS, CONCLUSIONS, SIGNPOSTS
Let me take you through a skim of this book, bit by bit.
In the first four pages, you should only really care about this sentence: "The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory explanation of the 'anomaly' of nationalism" .
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO IGNORE AND WHEN TO IGNORE IT? HOW DO YOU KNOW TO SPOT THIS SENTENCE?
1. Experience
When you’ve done it enough times, you’ll know when someone’s going off on a tangent or exploring issues that you don’t have time to deal with.
2. Context
It’s often clear from the text itself when someone is making a side point or exploring an extraneous issue.
3. Objectives
Why are you reading this: what is the subject of the course, the focus of the discussion? Suppose you’re reading Imagined Communities to think about nationalism: Anderson’s thoughts about the relationship of nationalism to Marxist theory, while not totally irrelevant, aren’t directly germane either. If this were a class centrally concerned with Marxist theories of history, or on Marxist revolutions and their relationship to nationalism, it might be another matter.
4. Signposts
“I will argue” is a signpost–“If the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia” is not.
OKAY, I FOLLOWED THE RULES. NOW LOOK WHAT I FOUND.
“My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. “
“To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy.”
“I will be trying to argue that the creation of these aretfacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they become ‘modular’, capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees ofself-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with acorrespondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.” p. 4
Good job. But these are pretty tricky passages. Table them for a while.
MORE SIGNPOSTS: CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS
At the bottom of page 5, top of page 6, you’ll see:
"I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."
This is key. You’ll want to understand all the component parts of this definition.
So, look for more signposts:
At the top of page 6:
"It is imagined because the members of event the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."
top of page 7
"The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind."
middle of page 7
"It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordered, hierarchical dynastic realm ...nations dream of being free, and if under God, directly so."
Why are there ellipses (…) in the last passage?
Here’s what I snipped out:
"Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch...
This takes too much time to unpack and it’s not directly relevant to your comprehension of sovereignity: if you don’t understand what he means by the term, you will have to seek comprehension in the text itself or from the dictionary; if you do understand (more or less), then this passage is a diversion.
More on the dictionary shortly.
bottom of page 7
"Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."
In contrast, this is worth unpacking carefully.
*FINALLY , e.g, the end of definitions
*deep, HORIZONTAL comradeship: unpack this word, it’s significant
*SUCH LIMITED IMAGININGS: may tell you something interesting about Anderson’s attitude towards nationalism as he describes it
Okay, so now you’ve skimmed the introduction and found some key passages.
Now what?
IN THE MIDDLE: SEQUENCE OF ARGUMENTS
You don’t have all day to waste on the intro. You’ve got to get a sense of the whole book, get to the middle of it. Here’s some steps to help you skim your way into the heart of things.
1. Note the sequence of chapters by looking at their titles: what does Anderson seem to think he needs to prove his general argument?
2. Read the introduction of each of the chapters assigned, and perhaps even the ones not assigned.
3. Return to each chapter as assigned, in the sequence they appear in the book. Do exactly what I outlined for the intro: read the introduction to the chapter and look for the key argument(s) it contains. RELATE SPECIFIC ARGUMENTS BACK TO GENERAL CASE IN THE BEGINNING AND CONCLUSION OF THE BOOK.
4. Sketch out an outline of the sequence of argument in each chapter: what evidence does he muster to prove each specific point and in what order does he muster it?
THINK ABOUT SEQUENCE AND WHAT DIFFERENCE IT MAKES
This is the hardest thing of all to grasp about both reading AND writing. Many students, when writing papers, understand that you need to clearly define an overall argument and place it up front in the paper.
But after that point, many student papers often contains a more or less random jumble of evidence which has some vague relation to the argument.
To develop an argument well, each point should lead logically and sequentially to the next. There’s a transition between chapter 2 and 3 in Imagined Communities that provides an example of this. Anderson’s discussion of print-capitalism and the way it changed the outlook of 18th Century Europeans leads logically into the next discussion, of secular national consciousness. His notion of simultaneity is critical to his argument in Chapter 3.
Outlining the sequence of argument in readings should help you grasp this–assuming the reading is well-written. This is, of course, a perilous assumption with academic writing.
WHEN TO GO FOR THE DICTIONARY, WHEN TO PUZZLE OVER WORDS OR REFERENCES
When a term comes up with great frequency, and seems to mean a lot to the argument at hand, you must be sure you understand it. If you don’t get what Anderson means by simultaneity, for example, you’re clearly missing something important.
Take Anderson’s use of the word allomorphism mentioned above, on page 7. It’s probably not worth the time to figure this one out, since it’s not directly related to the key arguments of Chapter One. So skip over it, unless you’re curious.
(for the curious: it’s a term from linguistics and geology for two or more forms of the same thing morphemes in the case of language, crystals in the case of geology)
The Dictionary
Yes, sometimes you don’t need to know what a word means, like “allomorphism” above. But if a term recurs regularly in a text, or seems particularly central, you MUST learn to pick up a dictionary and find out what the author means. Learn to keep one by your side and don’t try to bluff your way past such a term. An initial mistake about the meaning of a term can rapidly multiply into a gigantic misreading if you’re not careful.
TAKING NOTES AND PREPARING FOR DISCUSSION
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