Reading Games:

Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources

Thought Piece

     The article begins by describing the college life of an English teacher who thought she was going to major in Political Science. She realized that the readings she did for English were much more enjoyable and interesting than the readings she had in her other classes, even though English was a required class that had no relevance to her intended political science major. In relation to this situation, I once had the ambition of becoming a journalist and a writer for a car publication. However, after testing well in math and science in high school and actually enjoying Calculus my senior year, I realized that I didn’t just want to write about the cars I loved; I wanted to develop and create them. This realization took place after I began working on R/C cars and on my parent’s luxury sedan. I enjoyed mechanics and fixing things, in contrast to my disinterest in writing essays during my free time (Sorry, no hard feelings). The author, Karen Rosenberg, then describes how reading scholarly essays not only deepens your understanding on the topic of the essay, but on topics that are relevant in your own life as well.

     I believe that all information, whether it is relevant to your major or not, is information that you can use to figure out more complex problems in other areas of your life. Rosenberg agrees with this statement and describes how students should learn about the information in scholarly articles for this reason. However, Rosenberg contradicts herself when she talks about how to read scholarly articles where the intended audience is someone other than you. She says how you should not dive into a reading, but to “get a lay of the land” by reading the title and analyzing the structure of the article before reading through the whole thing. I personally don’t agree with this concept, as I enjoy reading through an entire article first before going back and looking for details. This is a lengthier process that takes more time, but in return, I learn more specifics about other subjects and disciplines that are not related to my mechanical engineering major. This coincides with Rosenberg’s first statement that reading scholarly articles not only deepens your understanding on the topics in the writing, but also on topics more pertinent to your own life. When Rosenberg contradicts herself, she mentions that readers can gloss over information that is not important to his/her own major by getting a “lay of the land” before diving into the reading. I don’t agree with this statement, and I believe readers should read the entire passage before going back to look for finer details. This way, readers can learn more about other subjects of discussion and apply the lessons learned to their own intended majors.

     Toward the end of the article, Rosenberg describes how to analyze an essay before reading it, including how to read the title, introduction, section headings, and the conclusion. I believe this an important process that helps the reader discover the main argument of the writing, but I also believe that this process should be saved for after the article is entirely read. Once the main argument or idea is found within the writing, the reader can then apply what he or she learned to his/her own major, and I believe this helps the reader join in the conversation of the article and enhance the article by introducing new and interesting ideas for others to interpret.