All right, so people are filtering in slowly. Maybe we'll have fewer participants than we have, we're expecting, which is fine. More time for questions and a slightly more personal gathering. So let's see. I'll wait a couple more minutes to get started, but I'll just sort of tell you a little bit about who I am while we wait to get into the meat of things.
My name is Andrea Ross and I'm a continuing lecturer in the University Writing Program. I've been teaching writing for a long time. Here at UC Davis, I specialize in teaching environmental writing, journalism, and business writing.
One thing that I did a few years ago in response to having taught writing for a long time was to get a certification in reading instruction from UC Irvine because I remember when I went to both undergrad and to grad school, I felt really unprepared for the kind of reading that I was expected to kind of already know how to do. And I think it's I think it's really too bad that we aren't necessarily made to incorporate that kind of learning into introductory classes, both in undergrad and in grad school. And so I do tend to incorporate that into my students'classes.
And I always get a lot of positive feedback about that because a lot of us have imposter syndrome. Like. what am I doing here? I don't know how to do this.
I don't know how to do this reading. And I can really, really empathize with that. And it's just never a good feeling.
And so I want to try to dispel some of that. I'm thinking that's probably why you also are here. If you don't have imposter syndrome, awesome. But if you're here for some strategies to improve your writing via reading skills, that's what we're going to be doing. So I have a PowerPoint or a slide deck ready to go.
And we have Teresa here from Grad Pathways to handle the chat for me, correct? Because it's really hard for me to do both at the same time. and to do any kind of troubleshooting that we need to do in terms of the tech kind of stuff.
And at the end, I'm happy to take your questions. Let me make the point that I will definitely make the slides available to you after we're done here. I have purposely embedded a lot of...
links into the slides to a lot of different resources for you, some of which will be helpful and some of which will not. But it's all there for you. So, you know, this is here, this is a choose your own adventure kind of thing.
It's here for whatever degree you need it. And so, to whichever degree you need it. So, if you want to just be here for the workshop itself, take what you can get from that.
Awesome. If you want to go digging into a bunch more resources later, that's available for you as well. So I see a couple of things popping up in the chat. Somebody's thanking me for holding space with the cameras off. We're all used to shouting into the void by now, right?
I'm really I'm looking forward to going back into the classroom and just hoping that it's safe enough next week. But, yeah, of course, you're very welcome. So I'll just shout into the void and know you're there with me, right? So again, we're going to go over how and why reading can help your writing and how to actively read and again a bunch of tools to help you do just that, including reference managers. So let's go ahead and get started.
All right. So what are some of the connections between reading and writing? I want you to think about this and answer this silently for yourself. How often do you read an article or book and later forget the main arguments or significance of those arguments?
It happens to all of us, right? And that's partly because of the way we were taught to read when we were kids, which is to start a book at the beginning. and read through it because we were taught to read chapter books and then novels um and That doesn't work as much for academic writing. How you read articles, books, and other scholarship will influence what you're able to write, how you're able to write it, and how effective or persuasive your writing is. So reading text in particular ways affects how and what you learn, what you know, and what you're able to communicate to your readers.
So those are some of the connections between reading and writing. So we're going to talk about active reading. which you may be familiar with that term. But it's always a good reminder, even if you are familiar with it, because it's easy to be a passive reader.
And that doesn't do very much for us in graduate school. So because reading is an active process, one that requires you to respond to a question and think critically about all texts, articles, books, blog posts, etc., we have to have some sort of process for doing so. We need to be able to think of the page not as a repository of words to be learned, but as a dynamic discourse that calls for questioning, analysis, interpretation, and response.
So that's the active part, is that we are then becoming part of the conversation. And I'm imagining that you all know that. Today we're going to talk about how to do that. So active reading then, sort of by association, is part of the writing process.
and obviously an essential part of grad school. So here is an example of a heavily annotated piece of an article and yours may look like this, hopefully yours does look like this, but we don't all read on paper these days and you know we're not all able to annotate by hand on the page and get all scribbly in there with it. Although that I have to say is my favorite but it's not necessarily very practical all the time, especially with the volume that we're reading in grad school and also how much we read on screen these days.
So we'll talk about how to do this kind of thing in digital ways, as well as organizational methods for how to do it. So you can see on this one, here's another example, the sticky note example. We all have our, you know, preferences about whether we like to write straight on the page or do sticky notes. That's completely just personal choice, but we're going to talk about what needs to go into those little notes.
So a couple of options for the on-screen idea. There's something called Foxit Reader, which is free. It's for Windows though, and I've given you guys the link here.
It allows you to annotate a PDF document, draw graphics, highlight text, type text, make notes. and you can print it out or save it. There's PDF Exchange Editor, which allows you to create, view, edit, annotate, and digitally sign PDF files.
And then Adobe Acrobat's commenting tool also works. It's not free, but I think we can actually get that through the university. So maybe I can look that up for you all later. But here's some explanation of how to do it.
So those Those links are there for you should you want to go get them later. I'll have you, I'll have Theresa or Olga send you this slide deck later on and you can use it however you like. So this is what it would look like when you're doing it online.
You can do things like, you know, highlight this way, you can put a sticky note in, you've probably seen this in various other kinds of platforms that you've used. You can write little annotations down at the bottom and then you can also, it keeps like a running tab of your notations. So, you know, it's a handy tool when you're working on screen.
All right, so tools aside, what goes into the actual thinking and acting and being active part? So first. you want to start by what's called surveying the text, where you read the title and all the headings and really anything that sticks out on the page graphically.
So whether it's a graph or a picture or a heading or a subheading or a caption or a pullout quote, anything like that, you do a quick scan of that, which activates schema, which means it helps your brain create a framework. that helps you organize and interpret the information that's going to be in the article when you read it later. So- This sounds really simple. It sounds really elementary, but it's incredibly important. And I think it's really not emphasized enough in especially in, you know, like secondary education and in higher education.
I think we did this when we were kids, little kids looking at picture books, but we don't do it anymore necessarily. And. And the reason that we were taught to do it as little kids is because it does activate this schema, gets your brain ready to accept whatever information is on in the text. And it just makes it a whole lot easier for you as the reader, if your brain has kind of already gotten headstart as to what's going to be going on in the text.
So give it a shot by surveying the text before you read it. Just like do a little scan through. Next, you probably heard this. read the intro and the concluding paragraphs, especially if you're reading Imrad style academic articles, you'll get a lot of information from these things.
I would throw in there also read the abstract if it's an Imrad article. And that gives you, you know, sort of the overview and the conclusions that they draw. So now you've spent maybe like five minutes or so and your brain has is set up a whole idea of what this thing is going to be about without you having to do a whole lot of, um, of the heavy lifting.
I don't know about you, but I know that when I was in both undergrad and grad school, often we would have these readers where there would be articles photocopied from wherever I never really knew. Uh, I wouldn't even know if it was a, you know, an academic article or a something from a popular magazine or whatever, whether it was from a book. And I would just open my reader to whatever page we were supposed to start reading at and just start reading through it. And I would get pages in there and have absolutely no idea what was going on.
And boy, did I feel stupid. And I just thought, why am I here? I'm not smart enough to do this.
But the problem was not me. The problem was my reading method. I was not doing the surveying the text.
I was not activating schema. I wasn't reading smart. And so it made me feel really stupid and hopeless and helpless.
And I don't want you to feel that way. So yeah, thanks, Teresa, for explaining what Imrad is going too fast here for my own good and for your good. All right.
So as you read through the text, that's your next step. Read an entire section between headings before you highlight or market. That is hard for me.
I want to get right in there. But you can really get lost in the weeds if you do that. And so if you just read a whole chunk, it'll help you to see the development of the whole idea. It'll save you time probably in the overall scheme of things. And it'll help you to understand it better.
And it will help you to beat up on yourself less because you won't feel as... you won't feel like you don't know what's going on. Next, you want to circle new or important concepts and define or summarize them on the text itself. So that's for me, like that's why I really like to do the manually writing it down is because it really helps my brain to get a hold of what those concepts are or what those definitions are. The same can be done on screen, of course, with the annotation.
tools that I showed you. But again, all of that is like solidifying information. It's bringing in information and helping your brain to catalog it. The next thing to keep in mind is it's important to create a system for annotating and stick to it.
So it doesn't really matter what your annotation code is. It just matters that it works for you and it matters that you're consistent. So here's a... some suggestions, but you can make up your own. You can use these if you want.
I use a question mark for claims that I think are off the mark. I put a star next to something that's important. I do a little up arrow to show relationship between a point that's earlier in the text or a down arrow for the same reason.
And I write ref to indicate a reference that you need to get, that I need to get. So, you know, I need to go out and figure out what they're talking about. that's a little reminder to myself so that I don't forget and that I don't kind of weasel my way out of doing that.
And then it's important also to number and map the order of key points. And you can just do that with with numerous numeration in the in the margins. And it really helps you to to map through an idea, especially if it's a complex idea that you're reading in a difficult piece of academic writing. Okay, so annotating as you read, what does that look like?
To annotate a text means talking back to a text. It means making notes in the margins, which we know. We know about the making notes part, but I really do want you to think about it as talking back to a text. You are now in conversation with it. You're not just receiving it.
You're having opinions too. So you can make a comment. identify main ideas and arguments. You have to know what those are before you can do anything with them. Define key terms like we just talked about.
Summarize key points. When we summarize something, that's how we understand it. If in my annotation, I just write out in the margins like the exact words that are in the text, it's not going through the mechanism of my brain to get solidified into an understanding in my head.
So summary is really, really important and a super key tool to us. And taking the time to do so in your own words will actually save you time in the long run because you'll understand the reading much better. And if you write down your summary, then you'll have these little nuggets of information that you can then go back to later.
You also want to use your annotation to ask questions. So, you know, where you maybe you question a claim or maybe you have a related wondering about something. That's the that's the start of our writing, right, is when we start thinking about how our experience or other reading relates to what is in the text at hand. You also want to think about challenging any ideas or points that. don't sound right to you.
That's where the opinion part comes in, of course. You want to make connections to other arguments, perspectives, studies, authors, discussions, etc. Often when we're in classes, we are reading pieces of gatherings of text that are related in some way, and often your professors want you to figure out what those relationships are.
So we're looking for those kinds of things. As you get farther into your studies, studying for your prelims, getting ready for your dissertation, the reading will be, especially for your dissertation, the reading will be selected by you. And you're the one who's going to be in charge of figuring out how those things connect. So getting practice with doing that now is going to be really helpful.
So I want you to think about you're not just talking back to the text, you're creating an active relationship with it. So it becomes alive, right? It becomes a live or liver document when you're writing and being in relationship with it.
All right. So besides just kind of getting the nuts and bolts of things and starting to figure out what our stance is with regards to what the text says, like. Do I agree with this? Do I disagree with this?
Etc. We also are often asked to read from a critical perspective. So what we just went over is a non-critical perspective. You examine what a text says and you restate its key points. A critical perspective is when you examine what a text does.
Does it offer background? Does it offer alternative arguments? Does it? offer study results or definitions. So you discuss aspects of the discussion itself in a critical perspective.
And you also examine what it means. So you analyze it and assert a meaning for the text as a whole meaning. You come up with an interpretation for it.
Now, you also want to consider whether you're being asked to in your studies or in your for your prelims or for your dissertation to read with the grain or to read against the grain. And what I mean by that is reading with the grain is where you see the text from the author's perspective. So you read it with the goal of understanding what the author is trying to say and why they're trying to say that as best as you can.
So you're really kind of seeing it from their point of view. Against the grain is when you push against what they've written. You seek out contradictions, silences, and perhaps faulty logic in the text.
So this is often the kind of reading that we're asked to do academically because we are often asked to make arguments about things and to find the flaws or the weaknesses in a kind of thinking so that then we can do our own thinking and writing about it. So what that might look like is asking yourself, what does this text tell me about the author, about their ideas and biases? What have they left unsaid? What's left out?
Why is it left out? Those are the kinds of things that you look for when you're reading Against the Grain. What cultural stance does the author reflect?
What does that tell me? And what are the limitations of the text? And what do those limitations suggest? So those are all things that we're looking for when we're really reading super critically with a critical perspective.
So now we'll kind of jump into from reading methods to note-taking methods, because that's kind of the bridge between the reading and the writing, right? So we talked about maybe using sticky notes to add commentary on the page or mark the text and then type the commentary in a separate document. A couple tips, follow a consistent file naming convention on your computer or on the computer. Save all your reading notes in the same folder. There are probably other methods or other tools available for doing this.
Do any of you have any you'd like to share other than the ones that I already brought up? or something that you've already done with regards to like a file naming convention that works for you or storage kinds of things. Let's see. If you do, do you want to raise your hand? And Teresa, you want to call on people?
Somebody's in the chat. She says you can chat or unmute. Yeah, I'm happy to call on people too. Okay, anybody? Let's see.
Mara says, I attach my notes with the article in EndNote. Okay, yes. EndNote is definitely important and we'll talk about that later.
Thank you. Anybody else? All right, we'll keep going.
All right. So the next step, once we've taken notes, so we've read, we've been all feisty about it. We've taken notes. Now we write a summary. And I talked earlier about how writing a summary is so important to really cementing ideas and making sure we understand them.
If you can explain it, it means you understood it. If you can't explain it, it means you haven't. understood it well yet.
So writing a summary is super critical. And I've brought, I've embedded in here a text by one of, or not a text, but a document by one of my, let's see if I can get to this, one of my colleagues in the UWP about how to write a summary with lots of steps. that just show you how to go ahead and do it. And then there's some examples of the kinds of words that you need to use, the kinds of verbs that are helpful for using, the kinds of transitions that we want to use in a summary.
So there's like a step-by-step thing here for you. Should you want to check it out? Oh, can I get back to my, there we go.
All right. Is that a new chat? All right.
All right, so we'll talk summary for a little bit. Here's an example of a summary. So, let's see.
So go ahead, I'm going to have you go ahead and read through this on your screen if you can. And this is actually just the first half of the summary. So go ahead and read through it and then we'll talk about it a little bit in a couple minutes. Okay, so we'll look at the second page of this in a second on my next slide.
But I wanted to just kind of note the moves that are being made here. So here we have, we begin with a bibliographic entry of it. This one looks to be in MLA style. It's important, of course, to start with that, because if you don't do it, you know, you're gonna have to spend a whole bunch of time trying to remember where you found it.
And it takes It will drive you crazy and it's awful. Even worse is if you... Don't remember that this is from a source and you end up plagiarizing it.
Certainly don't want to do that. So start with your bibliographic entry that gives all the information about the source. This first large paragraph, of course, is is just the summary of the thing.
You'll notice that the writer here uses short quotations and cites the page number. in order to give a very close reading of what is in the text. Sometimes people say don't use quotations when you're doing summary because when we rely heavily on quotation then we're not like running it through the machinery of our own brain.
I try not to use quotations too much but when there are important phrases that like are technical and are specific to the specialty of the text. Sometimes you wanna use that language. Sometimes we just can't put it any other way, but you do wanna make sure that you understand the article. And one thing to keep in mind also is that we wanna really get it, shoot, in that summary paragraph, you really wanna get the feel of the overall.
what the article is saying throughout the whole thing, not from beginning to end. Then there's a subheading of contribution. So what are they contributing to the conversation about this topic? This topic, of course, is super meta because it's talking about, you know, it's writing about writing.
And so it's, but that's my field. So there we go. And so this writer is looking at, okay, what kind of contributions is Driscoll making to the body of knowledge about this information, about this particular field of professional writing? And a couple of different angles on that, right?
How, what it offers us, what it focuses on, how it might, how it might relate to somebody else's work. That's the kind of thing that we find here in this contribution section. So now we'll look at the second half of it. So if you want to read this next five short paragraphs, and then we'll talk about those a little bit in a couple minutes.
So, either by putting in the chat or raising your hand. Anybody want to venture a guess as to what the function of the other phrases section is for? Just based on what we've talked about so far about the importance of note-taking and about the active reading process, what do you think that this writer is doing by having these quoted phrases here?
Does anybody have their hand up? I can't see because I've got my screen up. No hands up yet. Okay.
What do you think you might have put these up here for if you were the writer and reader? Like what would you maybe want to do with them? I would probably use them as quotes to support an argument I'm making in the future.
Yes. Yes. Thank you.
And looks like somebody, a couple people are chatting in too. Let's see what else they say. Giving personal thoughts about the quotes, connections between texts. So I think that, shoot.
I think that probably, yes, these are quotations that, or these are sections that really appealed to this reader that they're thinking they might use in their writing. Or ones that they, you know, we see this big yes right here, like she really resonates with this idea here. So these are probably things that she's kind of holding in reserve for potentially using in whatever writing she's going to do.
I keep doing that. And then the connection section is more straightforward. We're looking at connections to other research.
Again, the sort of the thicker the web that we can visualize, the better, the better in terms of being able to understand where this argument is situated in the conversation going on, better that we'll understand the conversation itself. And the more. masterfully will be able to write about it.
So that's, you know, two pages, not quite two pages of, I would say probably this is more like one page of single space writing. So it's a chunk of writing, but it will do so much for you when it comes to writing a paper or a, you know, a chapter of your dissertation or whatever, because you have done all this work. You've got it down.
on the screen, on a piece of paper, whatever. And you don't have to go back into that text again, unless you really need to. You've got what you need here, and that is the beauty of it. So this is the kind of thing you would, you know, as Maura said, like that you would want to save an end note.
Okay, so now we're going to talk about reading from a rhetorical perspective. When you read a text from a rhetorical perspective, you analyze audience, purpose, and context. So this is a big thing in my field, like this is what I teach when I teach writing in the professions to undergraduates, is that anytime that we read something, we need to also analyze like who it's aimed at, who's the target audience, what is the purpose it's supposed to serve, and how do we do that?
and in what context it was written. So the kinds of things of course would be to educate, inform, entertain, describe, or define. Those are the main purposes people write. And with regards to context, we want to think about How do histories, cultures, communities, and individual experiences influence the writing of the text?
So where is that person coming from? And then how does it influence your reading of the text? So that's what I mean by context. Anything outside the text that has influenced its writing.
Okay. Now, we're going to go to our next step in... preparing for the writing process.
What we're looking at here is an example of what I call a mind map. I think people call them other things too. I can't remember what they are.
But it's a graphic organizational way of thinking, of brainstorming, basically, where you start with a central idea, which is the central phrase here in the middle. It's outlined in blue. And all of the things that are offshoots of it. And then you can go, you know, to as much of a granular level as you want.
This is a great way of brainstorming and also of just kind of thinking something through once you've read a text or a bunch of text about a particular topic. Especially if you're a visual learner or a kinesthetic learner, because you're making this, you know, like a chart. So all of that is. is to say that there's lots of ways to prepare for the writing process once we've read, annotated, made notes, and written summaries. Now we have to like, that's all kind of like amassing information now we have to like put it back out there like this constellation looking thing we have here on the screen.
So that looked pretty messy, right? So that's not going to work for everybody, right? especially for really big ideas like a dissertation. That's like a starting place, right?
So to organize your sources and ideas, you could try a synthesis matrix, which I'll show you in a second. It's a table that you can use to organize your research, and when you complete it, it provides a visual representation of the main ideas found in the literature and shows where there's overlap. So that's the that's the magic thing of synthesis, right? We are always searching to see what the overlaps are, and then to make meaning out of those overlaps.
So I'm going to show you an example of a synthesis matrix that I've linked to here. And then I'll show you a blank one that I made for you. But here we have, so here you put the source down the left column, and then After you've read things, you'll, you identify, after you read the multiple articles, you identify the major themes that appear in those articles. And some of them will overlap with each other and some of them won't. These are the major themes here about the topic is anxiety in graduate students.
And so one of their major themes is that graduate students have multiple roles. And then you just put a quick little blurb about what each article says about that particular theme or idea. And then what they say about relationships, what they say about classroom environment. And of course, there's going to be some blanks in the matrix because not all things overlap in all of the ways. But it gives you kind of a perhaps more organized visual representation of what you've read and how it overlaps than that mind map I just showed you.
So maybe that's helpful to you. Let's take a look at the next slide where I just made a little. I made a little synthesis, oops, synthesis matrix for you.
You know, this is easy to make. Put in a table, years might have more than three themes. And you can just go to town with that. I have my students use these as well. After they've made an annotated bibliography, then so that they can avoid doing what they usually want to do, which is. compare things, this does this, that does that, the third thing does the third thing, and never the frame shall meet.
A synthesis matrix forces the writer to see the relationships between things. So it's a great way of tricking yourself into doing that if you, if that's something that comes more difficultly to you. Okay, so a couple of apps for reading that you might find helpful. Different price ranges from zero to nine bucks or three bucks a month. So there's an iPad app that you can use to mark up PDF files with highlighting diagrams, notes, and audio comments.
Good reader is good for creating and converting and editing and annotating PDF files. That one's free, I believe. And then there's something called papers for iPad and Mac.
which is good for reference management. And they help you collect and curate research material. But as you can see, that's three bucks a month.
So you know, that'll that'll add up over time. Do any of you have something to add about other helpful apps for reading that you've come across? You can either chat or put your hand up for Teresa. All right. Well, you can check those out if you want.
And we did have a couple in chat. Leanna says, I like margin note. And I've tried notability both for iPad, Grace.
I just use annotation tools within the PDF doc. Simran, I use Mendeley for references. Great. Okay.
So if any of those appeal to the rest of you, maybe grab what is in the chat box and you can check those out later. I'll do the same and perhaps include them in my next next time I do this presentation. So thanks for chiming in there. So if you do your active reading now, it will help you write your dissertation later. That's like the main theme of this this workshop.
Right. So to do that, you annotate text as you read. document the main arguments, the key concepts, connections to other readings, and the contributions to the larger discussion that that text makes. Make sure that you organize your active reading notes for easy access and use. And again, using a file naming convention is really helpful if you're storing it, you know, in your Google Docs or in your Google Drive or somewhere on your computer.
Make sure you stick to the convention so that you don't. run around on your in the cloud looking for your stuff all the time it's really frustrating when that happens um so other ways to organize somebody man mentioned we mentioned endnote you could also try zotero and i got the link there for you i mentioned google drive we all have access to dropbox or and box i guess we have now too um so with regards to reference managing tools um there's a tons of stuff we talked about end note somebody mentioned mendely zotero and papers, which I just mentioned a little bit ago, you want to do your homework to find what best suits your needs. So I just put, you know, put these in here.
A couple people have mentioned other ones that you might want to check out, but having a reference manager is imperative, of course, because that's the name of the game in grad school is, you know, using sources. This is what EndNote looks like when you use it. So it just organizes all of this information for you by year, by author, the kind of journal it is, what the title is, keywords, etc.
And I put in here a link to a tutorial for Windows and one for Mac for you should you decide. Well, if you're not already using EndNote and you want to check that out, that's always helpful. Yay for video tutorials.
It's like how I learn everything these days. Other resources that you might want to check into for active reading strategies. If this is a new idea to you or you want to just delve further into it, there's a link here to the Center for Student Achievement, student resources, especially about reading skills. There's the Fundamentals of Critical Reading and Effective Writing.
That's a link for you as well. There's a link on how to read research papers in particular. That's mostly what I've been kind of talking about how to do, but that'll go into it in more depth probably. And I wanted to just end before I take questions with some links that might be helpful for you in a number of different ways.
So you got yourself. here today. So you probably know about Grad Pathways. That's the link at the bottom of the list there.
Grad Pathways provides many helpful things for graduate students. I was just on their site last night kind of looking around. Why? I don't remember. But so many good things, just amazing resources.
So check that out. And then we have the AATC that's specific to UC Davis Writing Center. We have writing specialists that you can use when it comes time to do some writing.
And then the program that I'm here with you from, which is the writing across the curriculum, which is housed in the university writing program. And we give consultations and workshops and we we do it for for undergraduates, for graduate students. and for faculty. So we have lots of different things going on, but one of the things that we do is we have, you know, we can consult with graduate students about their writing.
And we have faculty who are, who specialize in various, various fields. So you could get a, you know, a specialty writer in engineering or STEM or whatever you're in. So that's also a really, really good resource for you.
And as I mentioned before, I will have either Teresa or Olga send out these slides to you so you can delve into these as you wish. And now is a great time for you to ask questions if you have any. So anybody, I'm going to open my, I guess I'm going to stop sharing my screen so that I can see y'all or at least your.
your cameras, I mean not your cameras, your little black boxes. Does anybody have any questions? Thanks. I do have a question. Yeah, go ahead.
So the matrix that you kind of showed or the matricie whatever to synthesize, how many articles would you recommend using that for? Well, I think you could use it for an indefinite number of articles. I think it's kind of expands to fit whatever you're doing, because you might be working on a term paper if you're in your first couple of years of grad school, but you might also be working on on your dissertation. And so maybe one for, you know, for a whole chapter's worth of articles, perhaps.
I think it could go up to that much. What do you think? Anybody else have any questions?
Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Is there a way to improve your skills of summarizing? How can I know if my summary is good?
I mean, I usually feel I extract too much information. Okay. So there's a bunch of questions there, which are all good, Chris. Thank you.
All right. So summary, summary improves just like everything else with practice, which is time consuming. But perhaps in grad school, since often if you're still in classes, you're reading the same thing as other students, perhaps you could compare summaries with each other. Often when we're doing the writing ourselves, we can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. But when we look at somebody else's writing, in this case, a summary, we might say, oh, that's too, you know, they included unimportant details or that's not enough or they're off.
you know, they're off the mark there. Of course, you wouldn't say that to them cruelly if you were in a little summary workshop with them. But I do think that it really helps all of us really with any stage of writing to be in conversation with other, with our peers, with other people who are, who are reading and writing about the same things. So that would be one way to improve the skill.
Sierra says, They like to set a word limit when they summarize anything. I think that's probably a good idea. But Chris's next question about extracting too much information.
Yeah, I do think that all of that could probably be helped by, you know, trading and sharing summaries with another person because you'll see where things overlap and you'll see the outliers and you'll say that'll... you know, give you a clue into like, huh, probably didn't need to include that tertiary detail or something like that. Does anybody else have any input to Chris's question about how to improve summary skills or knowing if it's good or knowing if you're extracting too much information?
Okay, does anybody else have any questions? Okay, well thank you all for coming today. I appreciate it.
I hope that you all got at least something that you can use, and I wish you all the best with your reading and writing. And remember that it's if you read something and you don't understand it, it's not because you are stupid. It's because either it's poorly written, or you're not reading it in a way that's that's setting you up to succeed. So do keep that in mind so that you can you can do what you need to do.
And I believe that you will be able to do that. Thanks so much, everybody. Take care.
Thank you. Thanks. Bye bye.