Week 2

In her article Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources, Karen Rosenberg attempts to explain to students how to read and understand a scholarly journal article that you might have to read for a class. She argues that it isn’t as easy as it looks to most people and some of the main topics might not jump out at you. She says a student should understand the reason for reading the article and it will hopefully give a hint as to what the main topics are for that particular article.

 

In previous articles, I have always attempted to understand the section titles to try to figure out the meaning of the following paragraphs. This strategy worked for me because it gave me a type of preview or heads up for what I would be reading. It would prepare me for what I would be thinking about. Sometimes this strategy didn’t work for me because it did just the opposite. Other times it misled me or gave me no information as to what I would soon be reading. I would definitely recommend this strategy to friends because for the most part it was a successful strategy. I think a section title can tell you a lot about that section. If I were to amend this strategy, I would think deeper about that the section title is saying because sometime I just glanced at it without really thinking about it. I would try to understand the title to my best ability in hope to understand the reading better.

 

Having a conversation with a text, to me, means engaging yourself in what the writer is trying to say. It means that instead of just simply reading an article, you should see yourself making the point made in the paragraphs or maybe decide if you disagree or agree with the writer. Another way you could have a conversation with a text is to try to believe the writer is explaining their point to you, to make it more personable.

 

I thought this article was somewhat interesting because I never thought of reading a scholarly article in the way that Rosenberg talks about. She made it seem less intimidating to start to read something that you don’t understand. Also, she made a point to make sure you understand the reason why the professor is asking you to read this and I thought that was a very interesting point. I think most students just read the readings they are assigned and do not really pay attention to the reason as to why they are actually reading the article.