Recon the Reading
Recon the Reading
Transcript
When you get a reading assignment, say, it's 50 pages long. Chances are, it's not all gonna be perfectly relevant. Chances are if you have three 50-page assignments for that class period, there's gonna be some of those assignments that are gonna be more important than others. So you want to find the paper that's gonna be most important. So if you have, if your professor is gonna be lecturing about Tocqueville, you ought to read Tocqueville. You want to focus your efforts on that.
And if it's something specifically in Tocqueville that you are trying to read, or that the professor's gonna be lecturing on, what you want to do is find within that, in that reading, where it talks specifically about that. But before we get there, I think it's important to, when we look at the book, to not just delve right into the reading, because we're not gonna know where we're going. We're gonna get lost in the woods, and it's gonna take forever. We're gonna slog through it. The only way to get through it then is just to read, because you don't know what's coming up. We want to educate ourselves.
We want to recon on the objective, okay? And so, what we do is, we start by looking at the reading assignment. We want to look at, if that's presented in the syllabus, we want to look at the lecture it's relevant to and the title of that lecture, alright? That way we know what the professor is trying to get at. Then we take a look at the book, if it's a book. Literally, we start from the outside. We read the cover, we read the back. We read the editor's introduction or skim it. We read the author's introduction.
And then we look at the table of contents. We look at the chapters and see what's going on here. And then we go in there. A lot of times in academic writing, there'll be subtitles within the chapter itself. We can break the reading assignment, the chapter, down into that. So we can, like, read the introduction to the chapter and then go in and hit the relevant subtitles within the reading assignment.
And if it's something specifically in Tocqueville that you are trying to read, or that the professor's gonna be lecturing on, what you want to do is find within that, in that reading, where it talks specifically about that. But before we get there, I think it's important to, when we look at the book, to not just delve right into the reading, because we're not gonna know where we're going. We're gonna get lost in the woods, and it's gonna take forever. We're gonna slog through it. The only way to get through it then is just to read, because you don't know what's coming up. We want to educate ourselves.
We want to recon on the objective, okay? And so, what we do is, we start by looking at the reading assignment. We want to look at, if that's presented in the syllabus, we want to look at the lecture it's relevant to and the title of that lecture, alright? That way we know what the professor is trying to get at. Then we take a look at the book, if it's a book. Literally, we start from the outside. We read the cover, we read the back. We read the editor's introduction or skim it. We read the author's introduction.
And then we look at the table of contents. We look at the chapters and see what's going on here. And then we go in there. A lot of times in academic writing, there'll be subtitles within the chapter itself. We can break the reading assignment, the chapter, down into that. So we can, like, read the introduction to the chapter and then go in and hit the relevant subtitles within the reading assignment.