Reading in an academic context is completely different from reading in a personal or even a school context. Consequently, academic reading can be challenging at first, because we are not yet familiar with the methodology.

We usually read academic literature in order to write a new document that synthesizes material drawn from multiple sources. Academic reading is already more complicated because we are reading in order to write a text ourselves, because we have to select sources for this, and because we refer to several sources to support an overarching argument. This requires very specific academic reading skills.

This overarching argument is especially important in academic reading. It emerges from the topic we have chosen, for a bachelor’s thesis, for example. Every topic has its own requirements that we must keep in mind not just when we are writing about it, but also already during the related reading. It therefore helps to have as precise an idea of our task as possible from the outset so we can interrogate texts as closely as possible. We will then know exactly what information we need and what information we still need to get from these texts. In other words, we read with a specific goal in mind.

When we read in an academic context, we should employ the following key skills:

To make subsequent reviewing easier, while you are reading it is helpful to create a document for each text to collect excerpts, paraphrases and keywords, and make a note of the respective page numbers. Reference management software such as Zotero can arrange this very clearly. It is then easier to subsequently find important information and passages from a text and quote them correctly, even if the book itself is no longer available. Verbatim excerpts should already be marked clearly as such in this document. This will enable us to distinguish them from our own notes and paraphrases and avoid plagiarism. An excerpt is ultimately more useful than a paraphrase, because an excerpt can subsequently be paraphrased if necessary, whereas it is not possible to reconstruct a quotation from a paraphrase.

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Source

This article is based on a simplified version of the “Multiple‐Document Task‐Based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction” model (MD‐TRACE; Rouet & Britt, 2011).

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