Active

Read while highlighting and taking notes.

Academic readers are never simply sitting there and reading. They are always doing other things while reading. They highlight, take notes, connect highlights to others, etc. This makes the process very different from other types of reading which needs to be reflected in the strategies and tools.

Choosing the Approach

Simply highlighting or taking notes while reading can increase the level of understanding while reading.

But the academic reader must also make sure that they direct these active reading strategies towards the purpose for which they are reading and adjust them to the mode they are reading in.

For example, readers can highlight important passages but they can also highlight key dates or data points. They may highlight to help them understand the core of the passage or they may highlight key sections they want to return to after their first skim.

The same goes for notes which should be aimed less as aids to memory and more as guides to understanding but also as something that leads towards the output of reading – which is the next feature of academic reading.

Choosing Tools

Choosing a tool that makes it easy to make notes or highlights on text is important. But it is also important to enable the reader to manipulate and organise those notes and highlights later.

Sometimes those two aims are in opposition to each other. It is very easy to use a digital stylus to make scribbles on top of a PDF, but then transforming the notes into a knowledge management system may take more effort.

The sorts of notes, academic readers take also differ by context. They may do so of their reading while sitting comfortable and reading on an e-reader or they may do most of it while sitting at a computer.

Deciding which tool to use for what situation and how to integrate the notes from both is a part of the strategy of academic reading. And making those decisions easier is one of the main aims of the Reading and Writing Innovation Lab.