Academic Reading Handbook

8/11/2019 Academic Reading Handbook

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Reading hacks to prevent academic dislexia

Gustavo Borges Moreno e Mello

March 4, 2014


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Contents

1 Introduction 5

1.1 About me and why I wrote this manual . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.1.1 fa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.2 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2 The reading habit 72.1 Picking a time to read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92.2 Picking a place to read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92.3 Before you start and after you nish your reading session . . . 102.4 The motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3 Taking notes 11

4 Recruiting the paper 15

5 Reading Strategy 175.1 Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175.2 Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185.3 Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195.4 Write . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205.5 Recite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205.6 Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

6 Organizing your reading material 23

7 25

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4 CONTENTS


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Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 About me and why I wrote this manual

At the moment I wrote this book I am a clinical psychologist, a master inpsychobiology and a frustrated ( therefore normal ) PhD student in the eldof neuroscience. I am a brazilian and, as most of us, I come from a familyof limited resources. Since early I learned that if I meant to survive in thisworld, I should come up with my own solutions. This attitude drove me towork early as basic computer skills teacher, join college and even adventurein the realms of entrepreneurship.

But you know what? When life is good you get cocky, and want newchallenges. Since kid I had the dream of being a scientists and contributeto the world with a meaningful step towards the understanding of the yetunknown. So I thought that it would be the perfect time to fulll this dream!So I quit business and joined the army of science. But I had no Idea aboutwhat was expecting me.

In the beginning everything was great! I had access to cutting edgetechnology and information, I had the opportunity to explore one of themost fascinating subjects in the world, the brain (sorry if you come fromother science, Ill still keep my point). But then it happens, experiments fail,progress is slow, results are not as clean as you imagined they would be, andworst of all everybody seems smarter than you.

Dont get me wrong! I love to be surrounded about smart people andlearn from them. The problem is not being surrounded by smart people,the problem is feeling dumb. As any other human being self condenceemerge from experience of achievement and strengthening of your ideal self image. For me and most of scientists I know it comes from being able to solveproblems (that includes understanding something) and nurture the secret self

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6 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

reassuring voice that says You see? you are smart, you can understand it,you can do it. And when acheivement is scarce, well you can say farewellselfcondence.

But you know what is even worst? Is when you feel that you cant even dothe basic properly. Like most of the people in my current condition, I face aparadox. I am supposed to be experts in certain eld of human knowledge andmaster a set of transferable skills like reading, writing, presenting, teachingand even selling your research project, but guess what? Very rarely theseskills are actively taught; you are supposed to learn them as you go, nostructure, no guidance, only exposure.

The result is obvious, in order to survive you come up with a bunch of

idiosyncratic heuristics to get the job done, with a very wide range of levelsof performance. Worse than that, who survives dont really know how toteach these skills, they just know that by doing it a lot you have a chance of getting there, and those who dont get there are because they lack in talent,intelligence or perseverance to get there.

This handbook is my attempt of ght against this culture of talent.Here I collected as much of these idiosyncratic heuristics I could in my freetime, broke them down to no brainer steps to follow, and relate them to themost common issues that I and my colleagues faced in academic life. So younot only has a solution, a plan to learn it, but also can know the context to

where to apply them.Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell founder of the scout boys saidonce Leave the world a better place than you found it. I hope this bookcan do this for your academy life. And if that happens, all my frustrationswill not be erased, but they at least will have a meaning.

1.2 Introduction

Reading 1 is the most important activity in the academic life. To publish youneed to read, to write you need to read, to do experiments you need to read,to propose a grant you need to read. Regardless, it is the most neglectedskill in science.

If you ask people about their reading habits you will nd all sorts of problems. Here are the most common:

I cant focus, so I drift away and end up reading the same paragraphmany times. I read slowly I get lost in the text, end up reading many papersat the same time, but none in the end. I have a hard time picking the relevant

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1.2. INTRODUCTION 7

information. I cant keep track of the literature I get sacred of equations, soI jump them I cant nd time to read I only read when I am forced to. Iprocrastinate a lot.

Once I read a paper I cannot remember the author, the paper, the refer-ence, just the overall information. No wonder it is very common to nd phdstudents that put reading as their most unpleasant activities. Well, maybe just after presenting, for a different reason. But you can imagine how peoplefeel about presenting in Journal Clubs. In academic life good reading skillis considered something that you will acquire with practice. Well, I believethat practice will improve your skill, but I also believe that good practice willimprove it better and faster. Thats why I wrote this manuscript, to improve

my own reading practice. But before we get to the nuts and bolds of readingskill I have a disclaimer. Assume that what I am going to tell IS true. Use itfor some weeks. Check the results. Keep it if you had improvements, throughaway if you didnt. BUT DONT JUST THINK ABOUT IT, DO IT! Ok,having that said, lets start.

The most common features I found in a good reader are: A reading habitand a reading ritual A reading motivation. A clear goal (question) witha immediate consequence (preferentially). A method for keeping updatedabout relevant readings. A reading strategy. A method for inspecting thetext, search for information and judge its value. A highlighting and note-taking system. Some way to record the information. Review the informationoftenlly, relating it to new informations. But without mixing the sources. Ican identify people that described themselves as good readers usually havemany of these habits or some of them very sophisticated.

In this book youll nd all the tools to develop these habits in the mosteconomical and effortless way I can imagine. But, you must be aware thatacquiring a new skill require some time until it generates more prot thancost. So stick to each exercise for at least 7 working days, until you stop toevaluate if you are having any benet.


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8 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION


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Chapter 2

The reading habit

Having a regular reading time is critical to develop your reading skill. Aregular reading routine will ght the inertia felt when you spend a lot of time without reading and will give you opportunity to practice the techniquesdescribed here in this manual. In order to develop a reading habit you needto: 1. Free some time to read 2. Prioritize reading 3. Develop a readingritual Freeing time to read seems to be the hardest due to the big amount of emergent tasks we have to do in daily life. But actually it is the easiest one tosolve. You can nd time to read by doing the second requirement, prioritizingreading. When you prioritize reading over other tasks you obviously have thetime reserved to other activities to your reading. But to do so you have toconvince yourself that reading is more important than the other tasks. Otherapproach is to learn how to organize yourself better, so you can nish what ismore important than reading rst and schedule a time for your reading. Timemanagement in a nutshell is the ability to: 1- bottleneck all the demands of your life in a single cue, 2- to order them by importance, 3- to keep trackof the deadlines, 4- to do them one at a time, and 5- to accept that it is okto not do everything as long you are doing what is most important. Here ishow you do it: The rst step is to narrow down all the possible sources of demands to just one big cue. Lets say one task inbox. The simplest one isa list of things to do. It is important that you have it available everywhere,so if you have a notebook, pick a small one to carry around. If you havea smartphone, than you can have a text le in a DropBox folder this hasthe advantage that you can have it available everywhere you have a internetconnection. The second step is to list everything you have to do, one task ata time. The third step is to ask what in your list you can do in 5 minutes orless. (Examples are, phone calls, send a e-mail to, get the price of something,etc). Mark those items and do them one at time, it is important to resistthe temptation of multi-tasking or excessive stimulation. While performing

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2.1. PICKING A TIME TO READ 11

nish a task as a productivity measure. It is also a good manner to knowwhen you nished your tasks, to give you a boost of motivation. If you getdistracted, snap yourself out of the distraction and restart your round, it isimportant to teach yourself that no distraction is allowed. Keep those to doitems available at all time and just abandon a important task for a scheduledtask.

2.1 Picking a time to read

Different people have different cycles of activities. Some are better in the

morning, others doting the night and nobody is good after lunch. You shouldpreferentially use this peak of mental productivity to dedicate yourself tointellectual work and reading. I particularly have the preference of readingearly in the morning. The reason is that during the day I can get stuck inproblems, meetings, or simply get too tired to focus after work. Besides,early in the morning, reading is my only concern. But the option is up toyou, just avoid reading during and after meals. Schedule a time to makeyour reading an habit. Most of the good readers read scientic articles inone to two hours depending on the familiarity with the subject and depthof interest in the content. So I would recommend scheduling your rst 1 to2 hours of the day to read. Remember that you don t have to nish yourreading in one sit. You are going to learn how to take notes while you readand this will help to pick your reading from where you stopped faster. If allyou can free for your reading is something short as 20 minutes, so be it! Thehabit of reading everyday at same the same time will allow you to developan habit, a mindset that will allow you to focus faster.

2.2 Picking a place to read

If possible, read in the same place in the same manner. Organize it in thesame way so it helps to develop the habit. For your reading, pick a quietplace, preferentially close to a wall so you dont have visual stimulation inyour peripheric vision. Turn off the cellphone, instant messengers, internetand other sources of distractions. Even if you are not checking them, thetemptation is enough to affect the performance. Avoid music if you can. Donot full yourself, music divides your attention in intellectual activities. Pick aplace that allow you to sit comfortably. Reading laid down can prone you tosleep. For the same token dont read into your bed. If you need internet tounderstand something, take note rst, make a clear question about what you


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12 CHAPTER 2. THE READING HABIT

want to understand. Finish your reading round, and then, and only then, goresearch in the internet.

2.3 Before you start and after you nish yourreading session

Relax in isolation for a few minutes. You need time to free your mind fromthe previous activities and concerns that can interfere with your reading.You also need time to consolidate the information without the interferenceof new information. One good way of doing it is with a breathing exercise

for 5-10 minutes: Breath in in four counts Hold your breath for seven countsAnd exhale for eight counts If you are especially tense, or stressed. While youinhale you can tense all your muscles as hard as you can, hold the tensionand relax them as you exhale. This exercise is proven to work for panicsyndrome and anxiety disorder patients. And it is rightly recommended tocontrol anxiety or help to block interference in your thoughts.

2.4 The motivation

One of the main distinctions between a good reader and a poor reader isthat the good reader has a clear and specic purpose while reading. Insteadof reading from the beginning to the end of a book or article, a good readermoves through the text like a search machine, looking for the answer to hisquestion. That being said, every good reader expressed this set of ideas:Getting the essential information is better than getting all the information.Get little information is better than no information. Getting questions isbetter than getting no information. Getting no information is better thangetting the wrong information. Poor readers usually have the commitment tounderstand it all, as if it was possible to absorve the book like a sponge. Theproblem with that is all the information have a similar level of investment

requiring much more time to read and understand. Also, reduces its capacityto remember the information, because of the noise created by the details .Economy of effort should be king. Before reading, decide what to take fromthe text and read with that specic question in mind. If other questionscome as you read, it is ne! Reading is an iterative process. Take note of thenew question, and move on reading to answer your rst question. When youget the answer for your rst question, than you move on to the second one.


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Chapter 3

Taking notes

Note taking is usually seen as a skill independent from reading and thereforemany readers neglect it. Note taking should never be overlooked, becausereading is note taking in essence! When you read, what you do is to highlightsome information that is relevant to your life and translate it into your ownwords or you create your own examples to understand it better. Note takingis essentially this process but with explicit actions. The notes you producehave direct correlation with the quality and amount of information that youtake and your ability to remember it. If they are organised, chances are thatyou understand well or created a good structure to organize the knowledgeyou took. If you highlight few but essential points, chances are that you gotthe core of the content. If you can put down in your own words, I would betthat you can teach it to somebody. The benets of explicitly taking notes arehuge and they teach you what is essential in reading. Thats why I chose toshow some good note taking strategies before you learn reading techniques.Hierachy and translation The rst thing to know about note taking is thatin its essence, to take a note is to put the information in a hierarchicalstructure, from general to specic, from important to unimportant, fromrule to exception, and put them in words that you can understand and withexamples that are directly relevant to you. Note taking methods try to helpyou to orient your attention to one of these two goals of note taking. Andrecord in some permanent fashion that do not consume your brain power.So here are some techniques: Bullet points Bullet point are essentially listswhere you write things in a hierarchical fashion. Where you can have topicsand subtopics and inside of each more and more items. To take notes inbullet points forces you to have to think on how the knowledge is dividedand organised, and forces you to re-write the information in your own wordsin a short way (since it is hard to make a list with items that have long lines).Other advantage of the bullet point is that if the information has no evident

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14 CHAPTER 3. TAKING NOTES

structure, you can still use it without any hierarchy, and than later comeback to it and re-write it in a more organised but concise fashion. Ideally abullet point should not have more than two lines and should have either anindentation or numeric code for the hierarchy (maybe both). Draw at willSometimes a image tells a thousand words. If and when they do, draw it! Idoest need to be a beautiful drawing just one that is clear enough to conveythe information. One caveat is the tendency to day dreaming and dispersionthat drawing can cause you. Especially if you have the tendency of microfocusing (obsessing about a detail) or are bored because of a particularlyuninteresting lecture or subject. You should ght the temptation to keepdrawing! While you are drawing the only thing to as yourself is: Does this

convey the content I want to remember? if it does, stop drawing and moveon. If you are taking notes in a class, chances are that you are going to needthat time to make other drawings. Cornell note system Cornell note systemis one of the best systems I faced. I was developed in Cornell university as astart. . . . (PUT THE INFORMATION ABOUT ORIGIN HERE) . It consistof dividing your page in three parts as shown in FIG. XX. Each part has aspecic purpose. On the top you have the main subject of the note, placeand time. Place and time are recorded because they help in memorisationby giving context. On the right big area, is your 1st note. Here is the placewhere you are going to essentially use the bullet point, drawing and mindmaps. The space on the left you are going to use after you nish your note.Once you nish taking the notes, you are going to look at them and writeon the left side, questions that could only be answered by your note, orquestions about information that you are missing to understand the subject.These questions are useful in reviews so you can cover the answers just readthe question and try to answer yourself. Also, they provide opportunity fordeeper understanding since forces you to explore how much your knowledgeabout the subject is solid. On the bottom part you are going to write shortstatements in your own words that allow you to synthetise the informationof the notes in the page. By looking at the questions and the answers youmore easily can provide a compilation of the information that will be veryuseful in reviews or when you are trying to teach it to somebody. Mindmaps Mind maps are a mix of bullet points and drawing. They require thatthe information you are received is highly structured. They are ideal formaking plans or reading reviews, since those are usually very organised endproducts. The way it works is very simple. The main concept, theme orcategory is put in the middle of the page, and you draw branches from itand in each branch you associate with 2 to 4 keywords. From each branchyou can draw other branches in the same fashion. The end result will besimilar to the FIG. XX and generate a visually interesting representation of


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15

the whole subject. Some people claim that it improves memorisation becauseof its visual component. In my understanding the main benet is that it isfast, easy and fun to do. And when you use colours makes a fast way toparse information. Cognitive maps Cognitive maps are ow charts that tryto enphatize the relationship between concepts. It usually works better as areview or a study note, when you try to understand instead of just collectthe information. It requires much more time to make, since it demands muchmore thought about the subject, but it provides a good framework to thinkabout subjects. The way you make a cognitive map is by drawing a circleor square with a concept, or noun written inside. Than you draw an otherconcept box, and an arrow connecting both of them. Finally, on the arrow

you write a verb that connects the rst concept to the second. If you keepdoing it with all the concepts you have in your note, you will end up withsomething similar to the one in FIG XX and will notice that some arrowsare not necessary, others are necessary but you dont have an answer tothem, and other times you may even have arrows that you want to draw,but you feel that there is a concept missing! And this is how this techniqueis valuable, to nd aws in your knowledge and connect everything. Somenote taking tips to remember authors and institutions For many people toremember authors and institutions names is a challenging task. Usually thathappens because we dont know them in person, they are just names in apaper. A good way to overcome this problem is using internet to give yousome graphic support to your memory. Most of authors have their picturesomewhere in the internet, you just have to nd it, and try to imagine havingdiscussions, conversations or making questions to that person. It is not failproof, but certainly makes a name more concrete. Regarding institutions,try to see it in google street view, look for images in the web or nd its coatof arms (many universities have them). And again, imagine yourself there,make a virtual tour, talk with the author in that environment and it willsink in to your memory faster. Flash cards This is a review note system, andthere are lots of people that love them, especially to remember proceduralinformations like techniques, vocabulary, or parts of a speech. You just needa bunch of cards, usually business size where you can write down bullet pointsabout a specic content. One content or concept per card, never more! Thewhole idea is to be able to get the information fast in a blink of an eye. If you fail to get the information in your card for more than two seconds, thanit is a bad ash card. Some people suggest even to write down statementsin one side and some set of questions for that statement in the other side, sothe value as a review and study tool is increased. Other very powerful wayto use ash cards is in by using it as an organisational tool. You do that byusing a presentation (prezi, keynote, powerpoint, etc) le. Each presentation


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16 CHAPTER 3. TAKING NOTES

slide should contain: The full reference of the article The main gure. Putarrows to highlight its important parts. The main claim of the paper Youropinion or question about it Each le should be a theme that connect all theslides. This way you not only create an excellent tool to improve memory,but also to improve your organisation.


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Chapter 4

Recruiting the paper

Collecting a good set of articles and books for your research or study is also avery complicated art. I am going to assume that you are a complete newbieso we can explore the different sources of reading materials. When you havethe benet of a teacher or a caring advisor this part of the job is simple.All you need is to ask him/her Where can I nd good materials about thissubject? What keywords, or authors should I look for? Is there any essentialreading (article or textbook) that I should read? And off course if you canalso get what kind of information you should be looking for it would beeven better. And him or her will point you to the websites that hosts themain relevant journals of your eld. Even thought it is true that there arevery good articles in very low impact journals and vice-versa. In average,high impact journals have better quality research, more avant-garde resultsand better known researches (which means that if you dont know them,you are missing out). Try the most broad journals rst Nature, Science,Plos One, Frontiers, and gradually move to more eld-specic or obscure journals. Visit their websites frequently. I recommend a weekly visit, just tocheck if is there any interesting news. Alternatively you can subscribe to thenewsletters. By doing so, you are going to receive updates about the subjectsyou select through your e-mail, helping you to save some time. Besides the journal websites you can use search and bot engines, like pubmed, googlescholar and pubcrawler. There are websites that allow you to search for asubject in many different repositories at once. In some of them, like the pubcrawler, you can even program periodic searches that will forward you the listof the results by e-mail. Usually these search engine are very powerful, butto get the most of it, what you write as a search argument should have somekeywords and syntax that is proper of the search engine. Try to get familiarwith the language of each search engine as soon as possible, since it canimprove a lot the quality of your search. Also, pay attention to the suggested

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18 CHAPTER 4. RECRUITING THE PAPER

readings. Normally when you make a search in a journal or a search engine,the website gives you some suggestions of related papers. Some of them arereally relevant and should be read. The last source of reading material is themost obvious of them. The bibliography or reference of a book or article.When you look for that article, try to remember why you are reading it, howwas it referenced in the previous reading so you have a clear starting point.Try to pick one day of the week to collect articles actively and store them inone reading inbox folder in your computer or by your desk. Offcourse, youcan collect passively the articles that get to you during the other days. Tryto read the articles with some kind of logic or organisation. Similar topics,chronology of the study or in the worst case scenario rst in - rst out. The

essential benet is to not get lost in under a mountain of reading materialthat can get intimidating and demotivate the reading habit. Having a planof attack to face large volumes of reading material provides the courage toopen the folder everyday and get something to read.


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Chapter 5

Reading Strategy

Now that you know how to take notes it is time to introduce you to the SQ4Rsystem. SQ4R stands for Survey, Question, Read, Write, Recite, Review,yeah I know that one of the Rs is in fact a W, but I didnt invent the systemor named it. The approach is very simple. You should read the article, paperor book following sequential steps. Starting with the survey till the review.Here are the steps.

5.1 Survey

Survey is a quick examination of the material to allow you to get familiarisedwith it. In this step you are trying to nd reasons to not read the paper. Themain goal of the survey is to clarify your motivation in reading the article, andidentifying how the information is organised. To clarify your motivation youshould ask yourself the following questions: Why am I reading this paper?To learn a specic information from it? Technique Fact Analysis To get aperspective? To teach about it ? I don t know (You shouldnt! Find areason) What do I know about it? And then scan abstract, introduction anddiscussion looking for keywords that will full your expectations. Attemptto understand the general organisation of the text: How is the text divided?Where the information that you want most likely is? Look at the gures if any and read their legends if you dont get them just by looking at them.Try to make a story in your head and as yourself : Do you understand it?Is there a missing information? This step should be fast and take no morethan 5-10 minutes depending on your familiarity with the topic. After youdo this, decide if it is worth the effort to read it or not.

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20 CHAPTER 5. READING STRATEGY

5.2 Question

Reading without a clear goal in mind is a very wasteful practice becauseincreases the effort in reading (because makes you believe that you shouldread everything) while reduces your attention and memory. So now it istime to consolidate your reading motivation and establish a goal for yourreading. A good way to set a reading goal is to nd answers to questions.During the survey you had the opportunity to attempt to make a storyin your head and get a supercial message of the text. You also had theopportunity wonder about what you know and what you do not know aboutthe subject and se if is there any missing part in the puzzle. With that,

you should be able to make specic questions about what you want. If possible, write the questions down as sentences. The purpose of doing itexplicitly is to guarantee that you actually do it. It is very easy to convinceyourself that you make something mentally and never actually do it. Foreach section of the text (I like paragraphs) you should be wondering aboutthe MAPS (Main Beliefs, Authors Attitude, Purpose or goal, Structure).Translating it into questions would be: What is the authors main beliefs?What is de authors attitude, tone and biases? What is the purpose of theauthors writing this and what information he wants me to walk away with?What is the order and structure in place to help me to make connections?Also the author usually highlight himself parts of the text. You shouldalso turn these headings and subheading (italic and bold words too) intoquestions. To help to produce these questions you can use the journalistmethod. The Journalistic method consist in starting the phrases with: WhatWho (with whom, from who, to whom, etc) When (since when, for how long,until when) Where (from where, to where) How (how much, how many)To gather information and attempt to emphasise similarities and differencesamong concepts. Here are a set of common questions that people makewhile reading a scientic paper: What is the goal of the research/ study?What is the problem? What is known? What is not know? Describe stepby step what the researchers did. If experiments describe it If model listthe variables, nd out the specic parameters and understand why of theequations If analysis cite them, write the equations down if possible Is it adescriptive or hypothesis driven research? Why they chose these steps? Howthe help to reach the goal? Is there a better method for reaching the samegoal? Do the results conrm their claims? Is the sample size appropriated?Are the analysis apropriated for the data they have? If you designed theexperiment, what analysis would you use? Are the axis labeled and in thesame scale? Do the numbers match their graphic representation? Who madeit and where? Is there a bias in the interpretation? Do the discussion ignores


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5.3. READ 21

a famous study that contradicts it? Is the reference biased, mainly from arelated group of scientists? Do the authors take in consideration alternativeor opposing points of view? The questions determine how you are going toread, how deep and what parts of the text you are going to read.

5.3 Read

You are probably saying WOW! FINALLY!. Yes, you are going to nallyattack your text with full force! But now it is not just using a bunch of good reading practices. All the steps you made so far to prepare yourself

to read empowers you to have a much stronger sense of purpose, focus andunderstanding. Also, you have a framework that allow you to keep yourinformation saved for later appreciation. So, now, the reading practices canbe put in good use. To start reading, use a place marker (nger or pen)to set the pace of reading. Move it in a constant pace to force yourself into a rhythm. This puts pressure in keep reading forward and preventsday dreaming. As we said before you should read to nd the answers toyour questions. Moving faster when it is obvious that the information isnot there and slower when the information is dense or difficult. When theinformation is difficult to extract, speak out loud the sentence to improveconcentration and understanding. Sometimes is necessary to rephrase thestatement in a more adequate sentence. This last one is usually necessarywhen you have passive voice and phrases with many adjectives and adverbs.Changing to active voice and removing some adverbs may help to understandit. React to confusing passages, confusing terms, and questionable statementsby generating new questions. This will nurture curiosity and pleasure inreading instead of anxiety and boredom. Try to read one paragraph at time.Read until the end of the paragraph before going back and read again somesentence you do not understand. Many authors repeat themselves in theparagraph by clarifying the initial statement with better statements andexamples. When facing graphs, try to remember that they can lie. Payattention tho the scale of the axis, check if they are the same, if they arelinear or logarithm. Try to spot in the plots parts of the gure that are mostrelevant to understand the results. These plots are usually generated by somefunction, which one is it? Do you understand it? If the article is about amodel or a simulation, reading will take more time. First of all, dont panic!Second, browse over all equations, and then nd the equation that computesthe result of the plot. Third try to access the functional shape (what kind of function it is) since it by itself can provide some information to explain theresult. Fourth identify its variables and how are they dened in the paper


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(usually other equations). Fifth, if necessary, simplify the equation withsimple values to understand what it does. Try to read completely throughthe relevant parts of the text before going back or getting stuck. Sometimesthe information that you want is further in the text.

5.4 Write

This is the time to use your annotation skills. The writing step is subdividedin Highlighting and Summarising. This step should be performed after read-ing each paragraph, since only after reading it you can tell what is relevant.Highlight as you nd information in a systematic fashion: Underline for im-portant phrases Double underline for examples Numbers for items in a listCircle concepts and acronyms Square around unknown words (that you needto look for) Use symbols to denote meaning: Question mark for claricationStar for personalities Exclamation point to important parts for exams Onceyou highlighted the paragraph, try to condense the information of each para-graph in one sentence or few keywords. Write it beside the paragraph so itis immediately available to visual inspection. Repeat it for every paragraphindependently. If you have questions, write them down while they are freshin your mind and revisit them once you nish the main objective of yourreading. Once the reading session is done, pass the notes to a cleaner form inCornell note system, using mind maps, bullet points and drawings as needed.

5.5 Recite

Reciting are two things. One that you do while reading and other that youdo after reading. For the rst, as you read, you can recite the sentence outloud to check if you understood it. For the second you rst have to generatequestions that would be answered by your notes, and write them down onthe left side of the Cornell Page. Cover the note, read the question and tryto answer it. Check the answer and if not, reformulate your answer and tryagain until you can deliver a full answer without looking at your notes

5.6 Review

The last step is to review. Make a summary of the content you read andwrite it down. Get every concept and try to explain it to yourself as you wereexplaining it to someone that dont understand it at all. Like to a 5 year oldkid or to your grandmother. If some information is missing, go to research


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5.6. REVIEW 23

it. Ask your teacher, advisor, specialist or classmate. If an information isnot necessary to understand the concept, remove it. If the explanation is toocomplicated, or long you can either try to simplify the language or try tocreate an analogy that make it easy to understand it. Other simple way toreview is to try to apply the acquired knowledge right away. If you feel theneed to review any subject. Enforce the habit of looking at your notes rstand than, if your notes dont full your goal, go to the original text again.Update your notes, by reorganising, cleaning or adding information.


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Chapter 6

Organize your reading materia

and notesl

Once you recruited the text, read it and properly annotated, the next stepis to archive it in a way that you can go after it later and nd it if needed.There are many softwares that allow you to do so TALK ABOUT PAPERSMENDELEY; ENDNOTE INTERVIEW CARLOS ABOUT HIS ORGANI-ZATION HABIT Papers Mendeley Endnote Crude way to organize in foldersand titles One interesting way to organise your Saras method

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26CHAPTER 6. ORGANIZE YOUR READING MATERIA AND NOTESL


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Chapter 7

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Documents

Academic Reading Handbook