Effective Reading and Writing Strategies

Hi everyone, I'm Nick Hopwood. If you haven't come across me before, I'm a senior lecturer at UTS. This video, you might be being asked to watch it because you're going to be working with me in a workshop called Turbocharge Your Thesis or Turbocharge Your Thesis Writing or something like that. In which case, this is a video that helps you prepare for that workshop and we'll spend a busy day doing a lot of activities that give you a chance to put some of the things I'm going to talk about actually into practice and to try them out. in a risk-free low-stakes environment. You might just come across this video through Twitter or blog or through links on YouTube in which case I hope it's useful to you and I guess the point is it would then be up to you to think about creating the conditions in which it makes sense to try some of these things out. The idea of turbocharge is not about cheating or shortcuts or compromising on the quality of research on the writing and the reading that you do just to be quicker. But I was inspired to do this workshop or prompted to do it because I realised that over time I'd learnt a lot of strategies and I attended workshops here at the UTS Library and I realised there were more I could have learnt and I'd been trying them out which enable you to be more strategic and purposeful in the way you read, write notes and write. And they can be empowering and exciting and help you build confidence. And they can save you lots and lots of time. And I've been very convinced that for a lot of people, particularly doctoral students and Masters by Research students, the default can be actually what's quite a time-consuming, unstrategic and inefficient way of reading and writing. And you might feel bad for doing some of the things that I'm saying, and you might disagree. That's fine, that's normal. But what I am trying to do is to suggest that it's not just about trying to do things quicker, but trying to do things smarter. And one of the outcomes of doing things smarter is that you often will actually end up doing them quicker. I've got some notes here to just kind of help you get along. There are three areas I'm going to cover. Number one, reading. How you approach reading, how fast can you read, how much should you read, do you have to read everything everybody writes? Two, note taking. What do you write or anything when you're reading? And three. writing and preparing for writing or warm-up writing. And this is not about how to do good writing or the content of phrasing and structure and things like that. This is about reading, note-taking and writing. So firstly, reading. You might assume that we take an article and we read it from start to finish, or a book or a chapter in a book or a holiday document or something else. I would say for me now, that's rarely the case. Obviously for some things I know they're important, I'm going to read at the beginning and I'm going to read every word in detail to the end. That's fine. Some things I may read two or three times, I might read them very, very slowly and I might go back and read them again and try and understand them. When it's relevant, spending a lot of time reading something that's really important or difficult is absolutely sensible and the right thing to do. But that's not always going to be the best approach. That's not always going to be what you need to do. That's not always going to be... what's most relevant to do. So I'm going to talk through a few things that I've learned from the UCS library and over my own experience and talking to colleagues, things that can help you maybe think differently about reading. One of them is previewing. So maybe you have got, like I do, a big tall pile of articles that you think you should read that people have sent you or you've found through online or you've got them from the library or you're setting the library and you're looking at a shelf of big list of journals. Previewing is really about... A form of reading that helps you make a decision about what kind of reading to do next, if any. So you can look at titles, section headings, captions under figures or photographs. You can even look at the references. So it might be that something looks by the title to be relevant to your field, but you look at the way the headings work and you look through the references and you're like, actually, this is not a kind of study that's of the kind that's relevant to me actually in the field I'm talking about. Although it looked relevant, it may not be. So this is about getting a sense of the content of something and making a more informed decision about whether you think it's worth reading on. That may also be a precursor to which sections you may want to read. Skimming is not cheating. Skimming is about looking through a text to try and find its main ideas. Before you make a judgment to spend an hour or two hours reading a paper, you can skim it. It's often normally three or four times faster than actual reading, and some people can skim much more than that. It doesn't mean you're trying to avoid the content. It's actually about finding what the key ideas are. So you're reading through, you can have a lot of material ahead of you, and you're trying to distill out what the key ideas are. It's not reading at this point for thorough understanding. It's reading for the key ideas. And it may be, but that's enough to say, OK. Those are ideas I'm familiar with, these are authors I'm familiar with, this is a study I'm familiar with that has other publications, and I want to get a sense of how this particular paper is different from other things that have been written. So you might use skimming to see if an article of interest is actually worth reading more. So after a bit of previewing, skimming could be there as a way of doing it. Skimming is not about cheating or missing things out, it's about looking for key ideas. Now scanning is kind of like a more purposive version of skimming. Scanning is a technique to locate specific things, relevant information. So it might be that you're looking at something because it's using a theory that you're working with, or a methodology you're interested in, or it's something which you know is kind of some findings that you really need to get your head around. So scanning is a very purposive, I don't need to take everything that's in this paper, I need to look just at this. It may be something where you expect the literature review will be largely familiar to you, and so you can scan for other things. You may be scanning for, how did these people do their analysis? It may be that you're coming back to a paper you've read before, from start to finish, and now you've got a new purpose. I have heaps of notes on my wall here, where I've read papers two or three times. The first time I might have just previewed it, or skimmed, then I might have read it in depth, and now I'm coming back and I'm scanning, because I've got a new purpose. What do I want to look for this time? Ah! I wanted to know how they did their observation or what they did with their interviews or I can't quite remember something, what am I going for? So scanning, purposive, it's on your terms. You don't have to read things on the terms of which the people wrote them, you're reading for your purposes. Now there can be what you call reading analytically. This focuses on a whole text structure or categories or hierarchies of information. Reading analytically is about how is something organised? Now, it can be really useful to you if, for example, you're at the stage of writing a paper yourself or writing a thesis and you think, oh, I just can't get this flow or I can't get the right structure or I'm not quite sure what order to do things or what's a priority for me. If you read some things analytically, they could be texts you know really well already. They could be new ones to you. You're not looking for the word for word content. You're looking for how did this person organize their ideas? Why did certain things come before others? That could be. looking at subheadings or themes if there is an analysis where it says you know we had three themes it could be if this person has written their paper well looking at the first sentence of each paragraph and thinking how did they go from one to the other what was the order in which ideas were introduced often the first sentence of a paragraph will be a key to what the whole paragraph contains so at the organisational level you may not need to read the whole thing you can just be reading analytically for certain things You might be thinking about two ideas that you know you're really interested in and how they relate to each other. I should mention, actually, that many of these ideas and the notes I'm referring to came from a workshop I attended here at the Graduate Research School at UTS by Terry Royce. So I'm thanking him and acknowledging him for this resource. It's enabling me to put into words and into an organised form something I have struggled to do by myself. The next thing on this is then close reading. Now, of course, this is what many of us do by default, and I'm not saying that all reading should be quick reading or cheap reading. But when we do close reading, what I'm saying is we should be doing it for the right reasons, not just because we read everything equally closely. And we have to think, okay, I'm deciding to read this closely now. What is the closeness that I want? Am I looking for how this person crafts their words? Because this is one of the most beautifully expressive writers I've come across. Am I looking for the intricacies of theory? Is it everything about their discussion and their findings that I'm really interested in? Or am I really trying to hone in on their lit review, either because I want to know what they've been reading and what's known in my area, or because I want to use this to learn how to write my own lit review? So even close reading doesn't have to apply to a whole text. You can, of course, read a whole text very closely. And even if you read the whole text closely, it doesn't mean you necessarily start at the beginning. There are all sorts of things to do with... reading and reading differently that you may be able to add or try out. This is not an exhaustive list, just what I'm putting out there is the idea that you don't have to read everything the same way and in fact it doesn't make sense to do so. If you start everything by making lots and lots of reading slowly, making lots of notes, I doubt that's going to be serving you well. You've got to think about what kind of reading is going to serve me well here. There's nothing dishonest or disingenuous about skimming some things, scanning others. Reading abstracts and titles for the studies that are closest to yours, you're going to want to know them in very much depth. There might be some studies that aren't really that closely related to your own work, but you just have to know they're there, in which case there's nothing wrong, perhaps, with just reading the abstract. If you're not going to be citing it in depth, you just need to know these people did this and this is what they found. Fine. I may be making a big mistake here by revealing this and making this public, but I'll tell you, I do that all the time. I read a lot of things very closely and I use many of these other approaches when I think it makes sense to me. Of course, you can always go back later and read closely. You don't necessarily skim first and read closely later. You might read closely, then come back and scan with a purpose. Now I'm going to talk a bit about note-taking. Now, I used to be, I think, one of the world's worst note-takers. I remember when I was studying in school, a book in French, and I used to get pens, and I had red, black, and blue, and underlined the words. And once the teacher had forgotten her book, and so I said, oh, you can borrow mine, I'll share with somebody. And she looked at my book and said, Nick. Every sentence in the whole chapter of this book is underlined. What are you doing? And she was right. Underlining meant nothing, apart from it made the book harder to read. I've got articles where I've highlighted well over 50% of the text using my little highlighter pen. I've got notes here on my shelf I can show you, where I was typing up notes as I was reading or afterwards. And they're almost as long as the paper in itself. What an utter waste of time. So I'm going to talk about... a number of things. Firstly, I'm going to think about if you're highlighting things or underlining things by hand or making notes in the margins. Margin and notes I think are really interesting actually, but highlighting, underlining, why are you doing that and how much are you doing it? How much? The more you're highlighting, the less discerning you are being when you're highlighting something. If you think about it, if you're highlighting 10% of an article, it means something's got to be really quite important before it gets highlighted. 50%? Meh! Half the things are getting in and half the things aren't. That highlighting isn't telling you much about what's important. So highlighting and underlining and typing up as you go along, of course they have a role. But you've got to be in control of them and make them a discerning. What justifies you highlighting something? What justifies you making some notes? Here are some alternatives that you can do. Firstly, and one of my favourites that I'm currently kind of really interested in, is concept maps. And I've got an example here. A concept map. is a link between different ideas. Now this one is, it'll be backwards because it's kind of mirrored through my computer camera, it doesn't matter about reading the text. It can be the ideas that the authors present, so you could do some analytical reading about the different structure and things like that, and then how they relate together. A concept map is different ideas or themes and how they relate together. You could have a concept map that was much more based on your own ideas. So it could be what am I taking from this? And it could be even ideas that are from your study, maybe not in the author's own words, but it's something you're taking from that text. So it's a link between ideas. So it's an illustration of ideas and what links them. You see, this is quite simple. Now, what I would do is I would read a paper and at the end of it, I would give myself one sheet of A4. And that's my limit. And I write up the concept map on that. I don't write it as I go along. I read the paper and I write it at the end. That also means I'm a bit quicker because I read the paper in one go. So I kind of whip the flow with the authors rather than breaking it up, excuse me, by writing different notes at different times. I'm reading the paper. I'm in the flow. Then I write up my concept map. This is about notes that organise ideas and how they relate to each other. You could also write lists. I don't do this, but I know some people have. So you could make lists of the key ideas. Lists of the key references or areas of literature. Lists of concepts. Lists of findings or analytical themes. And lists of implications. That could be a very easy way to come back and you could be looking at your notes and going, OK, what did this person say about the literature? There you go, you've got it. Very accessible and very easy. You might, in some lists, add something. So if it's concepts, you might add a sentence or two about a definition. What additional information, if any, might you want to put under a key point? You could also do, and this is hard, an in one sentence summary. This is you read an article and you give yourself one sentence to write down what you've done. Now, this may not be the only note you take, but it's a really good thing to do along with some of these other things. I often put a one sentence summary on the top of the concept maps I do. This forces you to think, what is the most important thing I took from this? Not what did that author want to say? What is the most important thing I've taken from this study? There's a five sentence version of that which I call a five sentence synopsis and you can choose which kind of five sentences you might want to work with. So it could be What's the context then? Aims, then methods, then findings and conclusions. That would be quite a standard one. And you also might want to add, what would it mean for me? You could be something about, who are the authors? What theory did they use? What were the key concepts? What were the key messages? What do I need to follow up on? Five completely different sentences there from the first lot. You could choose which five sentences are going to be best for me in summarising this, given the purposes I've been looking for. You might have... Another approach is a limited number of key quotes. So this is about directly taking phrases. And often on a concept map, I'll put a page number or even write out a phrase if it's a really, really juicy quote that's beautifully articulated and expresses what I want to say. Now I'd say again, don't go crazy highlighting or copying and pasting. The fact is the quote's already been written by somebody else, so you don't generally need to write it again. You might set yourself a limit, maybe two or five. What are the two best lines or sentences? from this paper, why do I choose them and why are they good? And this is starting to use note-taking to force you to think, to really do some hard thinking. Note-taking shouldn't be a passive activity, just oh yeah okay I've read this I should write it down. It's an active one where you shape the interaction between you and the knowledge that you're engaging with in the literature. I might add at this point that there's another form of reading that you could engage with which might be called critical reading. This is different from analytic reading that I mentioned before, which is about the organisation of ideas. Critical reading is about kind of judgement and saying, well, what aspects of this are good and what are less good? And of course, your notes may reflect that. You may make some five sentences on what the three key strengths and the two limitations or the two flaws that you found in that study. So you may be making notes that are critically oriented like that. A famous way of note taking is what might be called an annotated bibliography, or this might happen after you've made some notes. And this I would say is probably a slightly more elaborate or systematic way of the five sentence summary. It doesn't necessarily have five components to it. You might have a number of headings, some of which you use all the time and some of which you don't. I use ones like, why do I read this? What did I find out? What are the key arguments? What were the methods used? Are they saying there's more research needed? What was the design? All sorts of things like that. Annotated bibliographies, you can Google that and you'll see lots of examples. I've done an example of an annotated bibliography in my own blog, when you look it up about the works by Theodore Shatzky. This is not an exhaustive list of ways to make notes on literature. I'm sure there are lots more out there. I'm early in my experience of trying to find out ways to make my note-taking more interesting and more effective. And by effective, I mean note-taking that forces you to think. I've said it before and I'll say it again. And note-taking that serves me well when I come back to my notes. Coming back to notes that are three pages long, I've got an EndNote library full of notes like that, are not that useful to me. I might as well be looking back at the original, and that's probably better anyway. If I'm going to cite something, I'm always going to go and check in the original. I don't take it out of context. But my concept maps, they really help me figure out, oh, I haven't remembered that paper, here are the ideas, and yes, I do want to cite something directly from this, so I go to the original. So concept maps, lists, one-sentence summaries, five-sentence summaries. Key quotes, really key quotes, selective highlighting or underlining, yes margin, notes in the margins and things like that. My concept maps, you can see like this, they're done by hand because I find it quickest, but I do scan them and put them as a PDF in my EndNote library so that I can find them again pretty easily online. So although they're not searchable in terms of the words in there, I can look through them online without having to come back to my big bookshelf here. Now I promised I'd talk about three things and I'm true to my promises. So what I'm going to talk about now is free writing and just to prove that these are not just purely my ideas, here are the resources that I'm going to refer to from that I got from the UTS library when I think about these things. Now one of the things I think is really important is the idea that you warm up for writing. If you're going to go and run a marathon, you warm up and you practice for things and I think one of the things that makes writing difficult is the fact that we kind of, we go from nothing to starting to write what we hope is going to be the final text or something close to it. There are all sorts of writing that come in between having read and made notes or thought about something and the writing. And these in-between things often change your ideas, so you write yourself into new understandings. Of course, your ideas change as you actually go writing full texts. One of the things I find most exciting and releasing, if you like, is free writing. That's just put all my books away. Often I switch my computer off or my email off, don't have any literature there, I just write. That could be I've read something and I'm just going to write what I've remembered from it or what I took from it. It could be I've read 50 things over the last week, what I've been taking from it, or it could be here's a draft of a chapter or an idea for an abstract of a paper. You'll be amazed what you know and what you remember. In fact, it's often the best writing when I've had problems with voice. I've beat my supervisors in the past used to say, Oh Nick, I think this needs more voice. It's a very common problem that many students have. Well, if you're free writing, you don't have anybody else's voices interfering with you. It's just you. You don't have to worry about citations and references and quotes and years and authors and all that. You just write what you think and what you want to say. And you just start and you stop. There is no editing of free writing. You just go and go until, who knows, half a page until you run out of ideas. It's fine. Free writing is just about getting ideas out there on the page. You don't have to regulate it or evaluate it as you write along. There is no bad free writing. Just as making notes can involve listing and things like that, I think making lists is really useful for thinking about writing. Often I've listed the number of things I want to say and if it's for a paper usually that's way too many and you have to cut them down. And then you can think about how can I organise those? Now what you could do as a warm-up, I've seen some people try this, is do something completely unrelated to your research to get your brain working. So you might, for example, write a shopping list and then think, how can I organise these? Well, I could organise the items by which shop they're going to come from, how expensive they might be, whether they're to be eaten or not to be eaten, or whether they're large or small items, and that will just very quickly get you going. You could do the same with a whole number of things if you're writing a paper. What are the ideas? Who are the people I want to refer to? How can I group those together? Doing that, for example, for a lit review could be really useful because you then don't end up with a paragraph equals person or paragraph equals paper structure, but rather you group them together. So listing and outlines is really useful. Brainstorming is presumably familiar to many of you, but it's a very good way, I think, of starting writing or warming up for writing. Brainstorming is a kind of a very unstructured, just free flow of ideas. And it may be through a brainstorm that you create a list. So who knows what these things might come in various orders. Blank piece of paper and you just dump everything you can think about an issue. There's no judgment, no prioritizing, no valuing, anything at this moment. It's just everything. You can do that without any things around you at first and then you can add to it. And then after that you can start doing some organizing and critiquing. And quite often you can turn a brainstorm into a concept map. You can group things together, you can dismiss some things as less important or less relevant, and so a brainstorm can become a concept map or a mind map. Bless me, sorry about that. So, mind mapping, writing. Warm-up writing, all of these things I think count as warm-up writing or planning writing as well. I was told when I was doing my exams in undergraduate, right, sit on your hands first. sitting on my hands and then plan before you write and planning can be outlines you can write your headings and your subheadings i'll often write the headings subheadings and then the first sentence of each paragraph i said before if things are written well you can read the first sentence of each paragraph and get a sense of the ideas and how the paper flows writing the first sentence with a paragraph first what's this paragraph about and then you can move them around i think well okay is there something i need between here and here okay that's probably a new paragraph that you need then It's just two paragraphs saying essentially the same thing, in which case, if you're like me and you usually write more than is good, then delete one of them. So writing like that, outlines, headings. You can also do little bits of warm-up writing as a summary. So I'm going to write a paper about this. This is why it's important. This is why the readers of this journal will be interested in it. So a huge number of things I've covered here very, very quickly. For those of you who are going to be in the workshop with me, our turbocharging workshop, we're going to spend a day. You're going to get a chance to try out heaps of these things. You're going to be reading things in ways you've never read before. You're going to be making new kinds of notes and seeing how it goes. And you'll be doing some writing under extreme time pressures. It's going to be really, really fun, but it's a very safe environment for you to try things out. It doesn't matter if it all goes wrong. The point is that you get to learn and try out new things. I'm really happy for people to add to this video by adding comments underneath if you've got other suggestions. Maybe you think I'm a lazy academic who cheats all the time. Fine, I'm not saying read everything really, really quickly and cheat at the reading or take shortcuts. What I am saying is read smartly, take your notes smartly. Often making fewer notes will be better notes and make a result of better thinking and be more useful to you afterwards. And when you write, if like me, you find writing hard, do some warm-up writing, pre-writing, mind maps, brainstorms, lists and outlines, first sentences of each paragraphs. So, I hope you found this useful. Once again I'd like to acknowledge the Terry Royce and the University of Technology Sydney Graduate Research School. They really helped me organise my thoughts and get some of these resources together. For those of you who are joining me in the Turbo Charge workshop, I hope to see you soon. For those of you who have just been watching this as a student from another university, I hope this is useful and if you'd like me to come and do a workshop, get in touch with me. Take care, bye bye.

in a risk-free low-stakes environment. You might just come across this video through Twitter or blog or through links on YouTube in which case I hope it's useful to you and I guess the point is it would then be up to you to think about creating the conditions in which it makes sense to try some of these things out. The idea of turbocharge is not about cheating or shortcuts or compromising on the quality of research on the writing and the reading that you do just to be quicker. But I was inspired to do this workshop or prompted to do it because I realised that over time I'd learnt a lot of strategies and I attended workshops here at the UTS Library and I realised there were more I could have learnt and I'd been trying them out which enable you to be more strategic and purposeful in the way you read, write notes and write.

And they can be empowering and exciting and help you build confidence. And they can save you lots and lots of time. And I've been very convinced that for a lot of people, particularly doctoral students and Masters by Research students, the default can be actually what's quite a time-consuming, unstrategic and inefficient way of reading and writing. And you might feel bad for doing some of the things that I'm saying, and you might disagree.

That's fine, that's normal. But what I am trying to do is to suggest that it's not just about trying to do things quicker, but trying to do things smarter. And one of the outcomes of doing things smarter is that you often will actually end up doing them quicker. I've got some notes here to just kind of help you get along.

There are three areas I'm going to cover. Number one, reading. How you approach reading, how fast can you read, how much should you read, do you have to read everything everybody writes? Two, note taking.

What do you write or anything when you're reading? And three. writing and preparing for writing or warm-up writing. And this is not about how to do good writing or the content of phrasing and structure and things like that.

This is about reading, note-taking and writing. So firstly, reading. You might assume that we take an article and we read it from start to finish, or a book or a chapter in a book or a holiday document or something else.

I would say for me now, that's rarely the case. Obviously for some things I know they're important, I'm going to read at the beginning and I'm going to read every word in detail to the end. That's fine. Some things I may read two or three times, I might read them very, very slowly and I might go back and read them again and try and understand them. When it's relevant, spending a lot of time reading something that's really important or difficult is absolutely sensible and the right thing to do.

But that's not always going to be the best approach. That's not always going to be what you need to do. That's not always going to be...

what's most relevant to do. So I'm going to talk through a few things that I've learned from the UCS library and over my own experience and talking to colleagues, things that can help you maybe think differently about reading. One of them is previewing. So maybe you have got, like I do, a big tall pile of articles that you think you should read that people have sent you or you've found through online or you've got them from the library or you're setting the library and you're looking at a shelf of big list of journals.

Previewing is really about... A form of reading that helps you make a decision about what kind of reading to do next, if any. So you can look at titles, section headings, captions under figures or photographs.

You can even look at the references. So it might be that something looks by the title to be relevant to your field, but you look at the way the headings work and you look through the references and you're like, actually, this is not a kind of study that's of the kind that's relevant to me actually in the field I'm talking about. Although it looked relevant, it may not be.

So this is about getting a sense of the content of something and making a more informed decision about whether you think it's worth reading on. That may also be a precursor to which sections you may want to read. Skimming is not cheating. Skimming is about looking through a text to try and find its main ideas.

Before you make a judgment to spend an hour or two hours reading a paper, you can skim it. It's often normally three or four times faster than actual reading, and some people can skim much more than that. It doesn't mean you're trying to avoid the content.

It's actually about finding what the key ideas are. So you're reading through, you can have a lot of material ahead of you, and you're trying to distill out what the key ideas are. It's not reading at this point for thorough understanding. It's reading for the key ideas. And it may be, but that's enough to say, OK.

Those are ideas I'm familiar with, these are authors I'm familiar with, this is a study I'm familiar with that has other publications, and I want to get a sense of how this particular paper is different from other things that have been written. So you might use skimming to see if an article of interest is actually worth reading more. So after a bit of previewing, skimming could be there as a way of doing it. Skimming is not about cheating or missing things out, it's about looking for key ideas.

Now scanning is kind of like a more purposive version of skimming. Scanning is a technique to locate specific things, relevant information. So it might be that you're looking at something because it's using a theory that you're working with, or a methodology you're interested in, or it's something which you know is kind of some findings that you really need to get your head around. So scanning is a very purposive, I don't need to take everything that's in this paper, I need to look just at this.

It may be something where you expect the literature review will be largely familiar to you, and so you can scan for other things. You may be scanning for, how did these people do their analysis? It may be that you're coming back to a paper you've read before, from start to finish, and now you've got a new purpose.

I have heaps of notes on my wall here, where I've read papers two or three times. The first time I might have just previewed it, or skimmed, then I might have read it in depth, and now I'm coming back and I'm scanning, because I've got a new purpose. What do I want to look for this time? Ah!

I wanted to know how they did their observation or what they did with their interviews or I can't quite remember something, what am I going for? So scanning, purposive, it's on your terms. You don't have to read things on the terms of which the people wrote them, you're reading for your purposes. Now there can be what you call reading analytically.

This focuses on a whole text structure or categories or hierarchies of information. Reading analytically is about how is something organised? Now, it can be really useful to you if, for example, you're at the stage of writing a paper yourself or writing a thesis and you think, oh, I just can't get this flow or I can't get the right structure or I'm not quite sure what order to do things or what's a priority for me. If you read some things analytically, they could be texts you know really well already.

They could be new ones to you. You're not looking for the word for word content. You're looking for how did this person organize their ideas?

Why did certain things come before others? That could be. looking at subheadings or themes if there is an analysis where it says you know we had three themes it could be if this person has written their paper well looking at the first sentence of each paragraph and thinking how did they go from one to the other what was the order in which ideas were introduced often the first sentence of a paragraph will be a key to what the whole paragraph contains so at the organisational level you may not need to read the whole thing you can just be reading analytically for certain things You might be thinking about two ideas that you know you're really interested in and how they relate to each other.

I should mention, actually, that many of these ideas and the notes I'm referring to came from a workshop I attended here at the Graduate Research School at UTS by Terry Royce. So I'm thanking him and acknowledging him for this resource. It's enabling me to put into words and into an organised form something I have struggled to do by myself. The next thing on this is then close reading.

Now, of course, this is what many of us do by default, and I'm not saying that all reading should be quick reading or cheap reading. But when we do close reading, what I'm saying is we should be doing it for the right reasons, not just because we read everything equally closely. And we have to think, okay, I'm deciding to read this closely now. What is the closeness that I want? Am I looking for how this person crafts their words?

Because this is one of the most beautifully expressive writers I've come across. Am I looking for the intricacies of theory? Is it everything about their discussion and their findings that I'm really interested in?

Or am I really trying to hone in on their lit review, either because I want to know what they've been reading and what's known in my area, or because I want to use this to learn how to write my own lit review? So even close reading doesn't have to apply to a whole text. You can, of course, read a whole text very closely. And even if you read the whole text closely, it doesn't mean you necessarily start at the beginning. There are all sorts of things to do with...

reading and reading differently that you may be able to add or try out. This is not an exhaustive list, just what I'm putting out there is the idea that you don't have to read everything the same way and in fact it doesn't make sense to do so. If you start everything by making lots and lots of reading slowly, making lots of notes, I doubt that's going to be serving you well. You've got to think about what kind of reading is going to serve me well here. There's nothing dishonest or disingenuous about skimming some things, scanning others.

Reading abstracts and titles for the studies that are closest to yours, you're going to want to know them in very much depth. There might be some studies that aren't really that closely related to your own work, but you just have to know they're there, in which case there's nothing wrong, perhaps, with just reading the abstract. If you're not going to be citing it in depth, you just need to know these people did this and this is what they found. Fine.

I may be making a big mistake here by revealing this and making this public, but I'll tell you, I do that all the time. I read a lot of things very closely and I use many of these other approaches when I think it makes sense to me. Of course, you can always go back later and read closely.

You don't necessarily skim first and read closely later. You might read closely, then come back and scan with a purpose. Now I'm going to talk a bit about note-taking.

Now, I used to be, I think, one of the world's worst note-takers. I remember when I was studying in school, a book in French, and I used to get pens, and I had red, black, and blue, and underlined the words. And once the teacher had forgotten her book, and so I said, oh, you can borrow mine, I'll share with somebody. And she looked at my book and said, Nick.

Every sentence in the whole chapter of this book is underlined. What are you doing? And she was right.

Underlining meant nothing, apart from it made the book harder to read. I've got articles where I've highlighted well over 50% of the text using my little highlighter pen. I've got notes here on my shelf I can show you, where I was typing up notes as I was reading or afterwards. And they're almost as long as the paper in itself. What an utter waste of time.

So I'm going to talk about... a number of things. Firstly, I'm going to think about if you're highlighting things or underlining things by hand or making notes in the margins. Margin and notes I think are really interesting actually, but highlighting, underlining, why are you doing that and how much are you doing it?

How much? The more you're highlighting, the less discerning you are being when you're highlighting something. If you think about it, if you're highlighting 10% of an article, it means something's got to be really quite important before it gets highlighted.

50%? Meh! Half the things are getting in and half the things aren't.

That highlighting isn't telling you much about what's important. So highlighting and underlining and typing up as you go along, of course they have a role. But you've got to be in control of them and make them a discerning.

What justifies you highlighting something? What justifies you making some notes? Here are some alternatives that you can do.

Firstly, and one of my favourites that I'm currently kind of really interested in, is concept maps. And I've got an example here. A concept map. is a link between different ideas.

Now this one is, it'll be backwards because it's kind of mirrored through my computer camera, it doesn't matter about reading the text. It can be the ideas that the authors present, so you could do some analytical reading about the different structure and things like that, and then how they relate together. A concept map is different ideas or themes and how they relate together.

You could have a concept map that was much more based on your own ideas. So it could be what am I taking from this? And it could be even ideas that are from your study, maybe not in the author's own words, but it's something you're taking from that text. So it's a link between ideas. So it's an illustration of ideas and what links them.

You see, this is quite simple. Now, what I would do is I would read a paper and at the end of it, I would give myself one sheet of A4. And that's my limit. And I write up the concept map on that.

I don't write it as I go along. I read the paper and I write it at the end. That also means I'm a bit quicker because I read the paper in one go.

So I kind of whip the flow with the authors rather than breaking it up, excuse me, by writing different notes at different times. I'm reading the paper. I'm in the flow.

Then I write up my concept map. This is about notes that organise ideas and how they relate to each other. You could also write lists. I don't do this, but I know some people have.

So you could make lists of the key ideas. Lists of the key references or areas of literature. Lists of concepts. Lists of findings or analytical themes.

And lists of implications. That could be a very easy way to come back and you could be looking at your notes and going, OK, what did this person say about the literature? There you go, you've got it. Very accessible and very easy. You might, in some lists, add something.

So if it's concepts, you might add a sentence or two about a definition. What additional information, if any, might you want to put under a key point? You could also do, and this is hard, an in one sentence summary.

This is you read an article and you give yourself one sentence to write down what you've done. Now, this may not be the only note you take, but it's a really good thing to do along with some of these other things. I often put a one sentence summary on the top of the concept maps I do. This forces you to think, what is the most important thing I took from this? Not what did that author want to say?

What is the most important thing I've taken from this study? There's a five sentence version of that which I call a five sentence synopsis and you can choose which kind of five sentences you might want to work with. So it could be What's the context then?

Aims, then methods, then findings and conclusions. That would be quite a standard one. And you also might want to add, what would it mean for me? You could be something about, who are the authors? What theory did they use?

What were the key concepts? What were the key messages? What do I need to follow up on?

Five completely different sentences there from the first lot. You could choose which five sentences are going to be best for me in summarising this, given the purposes I've been looking for. You might have...

Another approach is a limited number of key quotes. So this is about directly taking phrases. And often on a concept map, I'll put a page number or even write out a phrase if it's a really, really juicy quote that's beautifully articulated and expresses what I want to say.

Now I'd say again, don't go crazy highlighting or copying and pasting. The fact is the quote's already been written by somebody else, so you don't generally need to write it again. You might set yourself a limit, maybe two or five.

What are the two best lines or sentences? from this paper, why do I choose them and why are they good? And this is starting to use note-taking to force you to think, to really do some hard thinking.

Note-taking shouldn't be a passive activity, just oh yeah okay I've read this I should write it down. It's an active one where you shape the interaction between you and the knowledge that you're engaging with in the literature. I might add at this point that there's another form of reading that you could engage with which might be called critical reading. This is different from analytic reading that I mentioned before, which is about the organisation of ideas. Critical reading is about kind of judgement and saying, well, what aspects of this are good and what are less good?

And of course, your notes may reflect that. You may make some five sentences on what the three key strengths and the two limitations or the two flaws that you found in that study. So you may be making notes that are critically oriented like that. A famous way of note taking is what might be called an annotated bibliography, or this might happen after you've made some notes.

And this I would say is probably a slightly more elaborate or systematic way of the five sentence summary. It doesn't necessarily have five components to it. You might have a number of headings, some of which you use all the time and some of which you don't.

I use ones like, why do I read this? What did I find out? What are the key arguments? What were the methods used? Are they saying there's more research needed?

What was the design? All sorts of things like that. Annotated bibliographies, you can Google that and you'll see lots of examples. I've done an example of an annotated bibliography in my own blog, when you look it up about the works by Theodore Shatzky. This is not an exhaustive list of ways to make notes on literature.

I'm sure there are lots more out there. I'm early in my experience of trying to find out ways to make my note-taking more interesting and more effective. And by effective, I mean note-taking that forces you to think. I've said it before and I'll say it again. And note-taking that serves me well when I come back to my notes.

Coming back to notes that are three pages long, I've got an EndNote library full of notes like that, are not that useful to me. I might as well be looking back at the original, and that's probably better anyway. If I'm going to cite something, I'm always going to go and check in the original.

I don't take it out of context. But my concept maps, they really help me figure out, oh, I haven't remembered that paper, here are the ideas, and yes, I do want to cite something directly from this, so I go to the original. So concept maps, lists, one-sentence summaries, five-sentence summaries. Key quotes, really key quotes, selective highlighting or underlining, yes margin, notes in the margins and things like that.

My concept maps, you can see like this, they're done by hand because I find it quickest, but I do scan them and put them as a PDF in my EndNote library so that I can find them again pretty easily online. So although they're not searchable in terms of the words in there, I can look through them online without having to come back to my big bookshelf here. Now I promised I'd talk about three things and I'm true to my promises. So what I'm going to talk about now is free writing and just to prove that these are not just purely my ideas, here are the resources that I'm going to refer to from that I got from the UTS library when I think about these things.

Now one of the things I think is really important is the idea that you warm up for writing. If you're going to go and run a marathon, you warm up and you practice for things and I think one of the things that makes writing difficult is the fact that we kind of, we go from nothing to starting to write what we hope is going to be the final text or something close to it. There are all sorts of writing that come in between having read and made notes or thought about something and the writing. And these in-between things often change your ideas, so you write yourself into new understandings.

Of course, your ideas change as you actually go writing full texts. One of the things I find most exciting and releasing, if you like, is free writing. That's just put all my books away. Often I switch my computer off or my email off, don't have any literature there, I just write.

That could be I've read something and I'm just going to write what I've remembered from it or what I took from it. It could be I've read 50 things over the last week, what I've been taking from it, or it could be here's a draft of a chapter or an idea for an abstract of a paper. You'll be amazed what you know and what you remember. In fact, it's often the best writing when I've had problems with voice.

I've beat my supervisors in the past used to say, Oh Nick, I think this needs more voice. It's a very common problem that many students have. Well, if you're free writing, you don't have anybody else's voices interfering with you. It's just you. You don't have to worry about citations and references and quotes and years and authors and all that.

You just write what you think and what you want to say. And you just start and you stop. There is no editing of free writing.

You just go and go until, who knows, half a page until you run out of ideas. It's fine. Free writing is just about getting ideas out there on the page.

You don't have to regulate it or evaluate it as you write along. There is no bad free writing. Just as making notes can involve listing and things like that, I think making lists is really useful for thinking about writing.

Often I've listed the number of things I want to say and if it's for a paper usually that's way too many and you have to cut them down. And then you can think about how can I organise those? Now what you could do as a warm-up, I've seen some people try this, is do something completely unrelated to your research to get your brain working.

So you might, for example, write a shopping list and then think, how can I organise these? Well, I could organise the items by which shop they're going to come from, how expensive they might be, whether they're to be eaten or not to be eaten, or whether they're large or small items, and that will just very quickly get you going. You could do the same with a whole number of things if you're writing a paper. What are the ideas? Who are the people I want to refer to?

How can I group those together? Doing that, for example, for a lit review could be really useful because you then don't end up with a paragraph equals person or paragraph equals paper structure, but rather you group them together. So listing and outlines is really useful. Brainstorming is presumably familiar to many of you, but it's a very good way, I think, of starting writing or warming up for writing. Brainstorming is a kind of a very unstructured, just free flow of ideas.

And it may be through a brainstorm that you create a list. So who knows what these things might come in various orders. Blank piece of paper and you just dump everything you can think about an issue.

There's no judgment, no prioritizing, no valuing, anything at this moment. It's just everything. You can do that without any things around you at first and then you can add to it. And then after that you can start doing some organizing and critiquing. And quite often you can turn a brainstorm into a concept map.

You can group things together, you can dismiss some things as less important or less relevant, and so a brainstorm can become a concept map or a mind map. Bless me, sorry about that. So, mind mapping, writing. Warm-up writing, all of these things I think count as warm-up writing or planning writing as well. I was told when I was doing my exams in undergraduate, right, sit on your hands first.

sitting on my hands and then plan before you write and planning can be outlines you can write your headings and your subheadings i'll often write the headings subheadings and then the first sentence of each paragraph i said before if things are written well you can read the first sentence of each paragraph and get a sense of the ideas and how the paper flows writing the first sentence with a paragraph first what's this paragraph about and then you can move them around i think well okay is there something i need between here and here okay that's probably a new paragraph that you need then It's just two paragraphs saying essentially the same thing, in which case, if you're like me and you usually write more than is good, then delete one of them. So writing like that, outlines, headings. You can also do little bits of warm-up writing as a summary. So I'm going to write a paper about this. This is why it's important.

This is why the readers of this journal will be interested in it. So a huge number of things I've covered here very, very quickly. For those of you who are going to be in the workshop with me, our turbocharging workshop, we're going to spend a day. You're going to get a chance to try out heaps of these things. You're going to be reading things in ways you've never read before.

You're going to be making new kinds of notes and seeing how it goes. And you'll be doing some writing under extreme time pressures. It's going to be really, really fun, but it's a very safe environment for you to try things out. It doesn't matter if it all goes wrong. The point is that you get to learn and try out new things.

I'm really happy for people to add to this video by adding comments underneath if you've got other suggestions. Maybe you think I'm a lazy academic who cheats all the time. Fine, I'm not saying read everything really, really quickly and cheat at the reading or take shortcuts.

What I am saying is read smartly, take your notes smartly. Often making fewer notes will be better notes and make a result of better thinking and be more useful to you afterwards. And when you write, if like me, you find writing hard, do some warm-up writing, pre-writing, mind maps, brainstorms, lists and outlines, first sentences of each paragraphs. So, I hope you found this useful.

Once again I'd like to acknowledge the Terry Royce and the University of Technology Sydney Graduate Research School. They really helped me organise my thoughts and get some of these resources together. For those of you who are joining me in the Turbo Charge workshop, I hope to see you soon.

For those of you who have just been watching this as a student from another university, I hope this is useful and if you'd like me to come and do a workshop, get in touch with me. Take care, bye bye.

Transcript for:Effective Reading and Writing Strategies

Transcript for:
Effective Reading and Writing Strategies