How to read a Challenging Text!

Country and the City 2009 (Originally written for Culture Nature Landscape)

In truth there is no such thing as a hard to read text.  (The exception here is a badly written text which is rare in published work.) What makes a text hard to read is not so much the way it is written but rather a disconnect between what you know and what the author knows.  If you had the same background as the author then you wouldn’t consider the text hard to read.  In order to be able to understand something that appears hard to understand, you have to build up the vocabulary of the author and figure out how they are using language.  In introductory courses, most of what I do as a professor is teach vocabulary and define terms.  The other part of what I do is illustrating the way that terms are used through examples and providing opportunities (through discussion, paper writing, role playing, etc.) for students to practice using concepts and ideas.  That does not change so much in upper level classes.  The key difference is that it is largely up to you to learn the vocabulary through reading the text.  Grad school is all about reading.  If you can read well you can get a masters degree or a PhD.  So the following are some things I do when I read.

How I Read a Text

When I am reading for content and really want to learn stuff from a text I am always seated at my desk.  In front of me I have the book or article I’m reading, a pen, a pad of paper (or a computer), and a pencil.  I use the pencil to underline important points or terms in the text and to write notes in the margins.  I use the pen and the pad of paper to write down significant points and more importantly my own summaries and paraphrases of what I am getting from the text.  I may also use the pen and paper to go off on a tangent and write down my own crazy ideas prompted by the text.  Basically the pad of paper is used to collect ideas that I might want to use later in a paper, or to write down questions or points I might want to raise in discussion.  I do not use a highlighter.  Highlighters are evil inventions.  They are good only for identifying text that you might want to come back to later and read.  A pencil allows you to write notes in the margin about what you’ve read.  A margin note may be a “translation” of a sentence.  It might be a note indicating agreement or disagreement with a statement.  It might be a reference to something else you’ve read earlier that connects with what you’ve just read.  That is a note that helps you iron out connections between parts of the text.  It may simply be a question mark or exclamation point!  (The reason I use a pencil rather than a pen has to do with my mother’s admonition that “books are your friends” so you shouldn’t write in them.  In addition I like being able to erase if I gain a clearer understanding of something later and want to revise what I’ve written.)

Black Boxes

Our brains can only handle so much at one time (at least that’s the way my brain works).  When you are reading something that is really difficult for you to understand, it may be almost impossible for you to understand some things right away.  In such situations the key is to write a question mark in the margin, and just plug ahead.  I think of this as putting it in a black box.  The term black box comes from social theories about the practice of science and technology.  In science you can only concentrate on a certain limited part of a phenomenon at one time.  So you make assumptions about stuff that you are not looking at and ignore the other stuff—in a metaphorical sense you put it in a black box and ignore it.  It becomes an assumption that you’ll eventually have to deal with, but you can only focus on a few things at a time.  In reading hard texts you don’t want to get too caught up on the things you don’t understand.  Instead you want to focus upon what you do understand and build from there.  If you get stuck on the stuff you don’t understand, you never get to the stuff you do understand.  You can always come back later and open up the black boxes you’ve collected.  In fact it may even be that you can understand most of a text without ever opening up some of these black boxes. 

Reading for Main Ideas

Often texts can be hard to read because they meander about discussing side topics which are important, but are not essential, for understanding the main point of the text.  Being aware of section headings, topic sentences, and thesis statements will help you keep track of the main idea.  Underlining and reading for the main point will help.  In many cases you can skip over whole portions of texts and still get the main ideas. 

Vocabulary

Reading a difficult text often depends upon figuring out new vocabulary.  A dictionary might be of some help, but you may find that the text you are reading uses specialized terms that are not in a standard dictionary, or that are used in a different way.  In such cases a specialized dictionary, like The Dictionary of Human Geography can be of some help.  Aside from relying on dictionaries there are other things you can do.  A strategy for building your vocabulary is to simply to write down terms you don’t understand and look for definitions within the text itself, seek out contextual clues, and/or ask about them in class.  When a text is introducing a new term or using a term in a new way, a definition often will be provided.  You need to underline that definition and perhaps make a note of it down on paper.  Sometimes, of course, the definition itself might be hard to figure out.  In such cases there’s nothing to do but make a note of it (stick it in a black box) and plug ahead.  In many situations the author assumes that you know the definition of a key term and does not provide a definition.  In such cases you need to generate your own definition by looking for contextual clues.  If that fails put it in a black box and plug ahead.  It might come to you later.

Other Texts

Aside from vocabulary one reason you may not understand a particular text is that the author is referring to and citing other texts with which you are unfamiliar.  Mitchell does quite a bit of this in the first two chapters.  Since his book is a text book he is very generous to you and gives you quite a bit of context as to who he is talking about and their significance.  A common observation about the difference between undergraduates and graduate students is that undergraduates refer to texts by their title while graduate students refer to texts by their author.  When you’ve read quite a bit in a subject you can actually begin to name titles when given the author and the date.  So one thing you need to do is to begin making connections between authors and their ideas.  One way to do this is just to keep a list of significant authors and their ideas.  (You don’t need to keep track of authors who just pop up once or twice.) When you are first starting out you’ve just got a jumble of ideas and names of authors and neither the ideas nor the authors are familiar to you.  It may actually be impossible for you to get the full sense of what is being presented without going and reading the text that is being referred to.  In such cases, try to figure out what is being said as much as you can, and then just push on.  Stick it in a black box and read on to find stuff you do understand or are familiar with.  If you have enough interest you may eventually go and read some of the other texts to which the author refers.

            The other common problem in a text that refers to other texts is sorting out the difference between what the author of the text you are reading is saying and what the authors of the other texts being referred to are saying.  Usually this is simply a matter of reading carefully.  You just need to be conscious of who is saying what.  Look for clues that tell you when the author is paraphrasing another text, when the author is commenting on another text, or when the author is stating his or her own ideas.  

Re-reading

I don’t expect you to re-read the whole thing necessarily, but after reading a difficult text, it is often useful to go back and see if now that you’ve finished the whole thing you can understand some of the things that you did not understand before.  In other words, all those places where you’ve put question marks in the margin and created a black box might start to make sense after you’ve been through a text the first time.  Sometimes it may actually be useful to go back and re-read the whole thing. 

Free-writing

Often just writing about what you’ve read in a free-form manner (like in a thought paper) will help you figure out more about what you’ve read.  Can you summarize in your own words what you got out of the text? 

Asking questions and discussion

I often read something and have no clue about what I’ve just read.  This has even happened to me while teaching GEO101.  After attending class, however, I often find that things became crystal clear.  Asking questions either in discussion or just discussing things with your fellow students before class can help improve your understanding.  Going back and re-reading after discussion may also help you open up some of those black boxes that you didn’t right away even during discussion. 

Last Words

Reading a challenging text can be frustrating.  The important thing is to make yourself comfortable with the ambiguity and not understanding things.  Of course you don’t’ want to be too comfortable, because then you’ll never do the work required for more complete understanding.  The key is to focus upon what you do understand and build on that.