Reading Journals
Your Reading Journal is simply the section of your notebook which you reserve
for writing down questions about what you have been reading for the class and
the thoughts which that reading provokes. Use your journal with class readings,
exercises, and lectures so that you can recall your questions, use them to propel
the discussion of the work, and to resolve any confusions you have about the
text. Understanding what you have read is obviously central to being able to
think about what it means. If you want to deal with the meaning and you first
have to attend to the understanding. The reading journal serves that end. Your
instructor may go over your work during conferences.
Reading carefully requires that you fuse together the meaning, the arguments,
the points and illustrations, the analogies and figures into a cumulative, grounded
sense of the whole. To do this means that you may have to read something more
than once. Take notes. Mark out passages which are elusive or confusing so that
you can relocate them easily to reread or discuss them with someone else. You
will find that you have to move back and forth in the text to clarify something
you read earlier in light of the paragraph or sentence you have just completed.
Reading well requires that you develop an internal dialog, an ongoing commentary,
a questioning process, a piecing together of the meaning of what it is you are
reading. To read carefully is often difficult, intellectually demanding, requiring
complete concentration. You have to keep moving across the terrain, crossing
back over familiar ground and then moving forward again. Some prefer to read
a piece through once or twice quickly to get their bearings and then return
to go through it more consciously, more critically.
Parting advice: Write in your books, highlight, underline important passages,
write down questions in your reading journal that you want to raise with other
students and the instructor about the piece on which you are working. Look up
words; keep a list of them in your writing or reading journal. Use some of the
techniques discussed in the course book to help you further develop your critical
reading skills.
Author: Mark Ferrer, Director, SBCC Faculty Resource
Center, Gyrus