Tackling Hard Reading (Veteran Voices)

There have been many times, throughout college, in which I felt completely overwhelmed by either the amount or the level of difficulty of a reading. So there have been times when I get assigned some reading that is either so impenetrably dense or just so long that I know that I cannot finish it to prep for the next lecture. In college, professors, surprisingly, are unaware that you have other classes. And because of this, they assign a huge amount of reading, Sometimes hundreds of pages a week. And because your other classes you also have hundreds of pages of reading a week, you won't be able to read it all.

So at that point you have to go into some sort of reading triage. Quite honestly, the best way for me to overcome that was to prime the reading. And for me that meant doing a little bit of research, personally, Shmoop was my best friend. So what Shmoop is, is it's kind of like a Spark notes type website, and they give you really important historical background information which really, really helps. So for example, I was reading a book by Stendhal called The Red and the Black. And I did not know very much about the French Revolution.

So I went to my friend Shmoop and I learned some of the key vocabulary, and I learned some of the key facts about the war and about the revolution that just I would have not understood the text without it. So definitely priming the reading, using these Spark notes type websites, Wikipedia is great. And also, going to office hours, talking to your professors, talking over with somebody who's gone through this material before, can really help.