Reading, Summarizing, and Synthesizing

**Disclaimer: I promise not all posts will be this long**

I wish we talked more about reading scholarly texts and how to take notes. Because we don’t, I have this fear that it should be something self-evident. And I suppose one would assume that after being in graduate school for 8 years I would know how to read. But alas, I feel woefully inadequate when faced with a pile of library books, a document folder of “to read” articles, and a timer in my head that says I should have started writing by now, by yesterday as a matter of fact.

Although by now I’ve learned that the best way to resolve my writing issues is to actually write, I do think this was a worthwhile detour. So my mission right now (and I need to use a word like “mission” to reinforce to myself the dire necessity of doing this) is to gather some strategies together for improving my reading and note-taking strategies. I’ve listed below some guidelines I synthesized from two excellent sources: Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts and Wendy Laura Belcher’s How to Write a Scholarly Journal Article in 12 Weeks, as well as some tips I’ve picked up from colleagues along the way. Please add your own insights!

From various conversations with colleagues and my own trial & error:

· When a book is particularly hard to grasp, book reviews can often help as a launching off point for your own understanding.

· Another handy exercise: freewriting. Choose a quotation or two that seem important and type them up on a blank page. Write about them for a bit and you will find that through writing you come to understand the author’s main point. This enacts one of my mentor’s philosophies that we write to learn.

· I have recently tried switching to taking notes straight on the computer, but I am now reconsidering this strategy because something about writing down notes, either in the margins or on a piece of paper is a tactile activity that connects better with my brain. Several of my colleagues have also found this to be true and can even break down their marginalia commenting strategy into the two things they comment on most: they either identify the move the author makes at a certain point in the text or they identify how a particular passage or section relates to their own ideas.

· One colleague reads all the way through first simply marks significant passages along the way. Later, she copies the passages out and then writes a small summary paragraph for each of those passages.

· If you do nothing else, at least read the introduction (of the article or the book) then stop and write a summary of the what the writer is doing (ex: George Levine is doing x).

From Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks:

The key things you need to glean from any piece: the topic, the approach, and the argument.After you read a few things, be sure to write them up and even begin incorporating them into a draft of your own text. Otherwise, you will forget the relevance of the pieces you’ve read. Belcher suggests the following principles of reading: “reduce articles to their essence, read and write in the same day, subscribe to journals, and learn to skim” (150).

The next step in reading and synthesizing according to Belcher is to figure out your entry point, or how you relate to the literature. Typical “entry points” include extending past research, filling in a gap, addressing a contradiction or tension in past research, or weighing in on one side of the debate. Belcher summarizes these entry points into three positions one can take toward previous research: 1) arguing the research is inadequate or non-existent, 2) using the research as a spring board to extend the discussion, 3) arguing something is unsound about the research and providing a corrective (152).

Belcher also cites Henry A. Giroux’s reading method:

“Whenever I read something, I mark off in the text those paragraphs that contain important organizing ideas. I might circle and paragraph and write an organizing idea in the margins. When I finish the piece, I copy it and go through a cut-and-paste procedure in which I type out the source on the top of a piece of paper, type in the organizing ideas from the piece (article, chapter, and so on), and place the paragraph underneath its respective organizing idea. Hence, I may read a twenty-page piece by, lets say, Fred Jameson. In that piece, I may find fifteen sections that I marked as important. I then reference the piece, type out the organizing ideas starting with the order in which I read the piece. I then paste the respective paragraphs under the typed heading. In the end, I may end up with a four-page cut-out of Jameson’s piece. I then duplicate it so I can have a clean copy and I file the original. When my research is done, I read all of the cut-and-past articles, one by one, and I write next to each paragraph in each article an organizing idea. I then type out a cover sheet listing all of the organizing ideas for each working article. I then paste all of the cover sheets on artist boards and try to figure out from reading the sheets how I might develop my arguments”

From Rewriting: How to do Things with Texts

One of the most helpful points in Harris’s book has to do with how to read a text and how you present your reading of the text. When you are including the argument of another scholar, Harris claims you need to do more than just explain the argument, you also need to explain the perspective from which you are reading the argument (by which he means the values you bring and the moments you notice). This creates a balance between respecting what the scholar actually said while admitting how you are using their research for your own ends. Like Belcher, Harris lists three key things you need to glean from each source to write an effective summary: the aims, methods, and materials. To help you find these, he suggests a reading practice that also includes three tasks: 1) define the project, 2) note keywords or passages, 3) assess the uses and limits. I especially like his explanation of number one because I have always had trouble picking out the thesis or main idea of a complex work. Harris argues this is because most scholarly articles and books do not pursue a single claim but instead “think through a complex set of texts and problems” (17). Instead of asking the static question “what is the thesis,” he suggests instead a list of questions that suggest movement (and I quote):

What issues drive this essay? What ideas does it explore? What lines of inquiry does it develop? What is the writer trying to do in this text? What is her or her project?

Understanding that you want to actually show your perspective on a writer’s work as you are summarizing them also helps with pulling quotations from the work. Harris suggests, “You don’t quote from a text to explain what it means in some neutral or objective way. You quote from a text to show what your perspective on it makes visible” (20).

What I like most about number three, assessing the uses and limits, is Harris’s more generous approach to agreeing and disagreeing. Rather than discount other scholarship in order to make your own seem worthwhile, he suggests showing what is both useful and limiting about other’s work. Although my own tendency has been to rejoice when I find an article that seems just flat out wrong, Harris has changed my thinking through his provocative statement that, “simply proving someone else wrong rarely advances your own thinking” (27).

Harris has much more in his book about incorporating other’s work into your own, but these few points encapsulate what he says that helps me think about how to read and take notes.