How do you actually read a piece of academic literature?
How do you actually read academic literature, so that you can really get what you need out of it and form the basis for a fabulous, critical literature review?
Here’s my strategy - three easy steps…
Firstly, put your pen and notebook to the side, away, out of reach. Because what you’re going to do first is read through it without taking any notes.
Once you’ve read a few paragraphs, you’ll be getting TWITCHY FINGERS! You are going to want to write something down – DON’T! It is important that you don’t write any notes at this stage, because you’re simply trying to absorb the text, get a feel for the structure, the main points, the kind of evidence that’s being used.
Now a caveat – if the piece of literature that you’ve chosen for today is a BOOK. I don’t expect you to read every single page without taking notes. For you, the first read is a skim read. Just flick through it all. Familiarize yourself with the layout. What’s in it? What are the individual chapters about? Leave that pen alone!
Secondly. Read through the text again and this time, make notes as you go. The first read will have given you an idea of the layout and you feel confident finding your way around it. It’s like your second visit to a restaurant, you know where the toilets are, you know where the bar is, you know what’s on the menu. You are familiar with it. Now, make your critical notes on that text. Pose questions. Ask, “So what?”, “What are the implications of this?”, “Is this argument a convincing one?”.
Analyse, interpret evaluate - another blog on that is coming very soon!
If you’ve printed off a journal article or book chapter, highlight particular passages, underline words, make notes in the margin get involved. If its an actual physical book that you’ve borrowed from, the library, please don’t do any of that stuff, because it’s just uncouth and feral! Instead take a picture of the page with your phone, go photocopy it, just don’t be mean to the books!
Thirdly, write up those notes, get them into some kind of sensible order that you will be able to use for when you write up your literature review. Your future self will thank you for this. Have a standard format for it. You might want to use a Literature Review Log Sheet – like the free one you can get from clicking on this link!
Follow this three-step process for every piece of literature you read and you will save yourself a lot of time! Check out my YouTube video on this topic below.