Productive and interactive

Read to write and communicate about 1.

Academic readers read to write. When they write, they write to communicate and otherwise interact with others.

But writing is more than just writing about something we read, it is also a way of helping us formulate knowledge and exposing to ourselves the gaps we may have papered over in our head.

At any rate, writing and speaking is a part of academic reading much more than with other kinds of reading and our strategies and tools need to reflect that.

Choosing the Approach

The academic reader should approach reading as a part of the writing process. “20% of reading is writing.” is not a bad formula to adopt.

Writing summaries of what the arguments and facts contained in what they read, is one of the core jobs of academics. But these summaries should be aimed at others rather than the readers themselves. Writing summaries as explanations for others is much more effective than simply writing them to replicate the core point. The reader/writer is oriented towards a deeper kind of understanding when they expect someone to ask questions.

This is made even more powerful when the reader is actually engaging in a productive dialogue with others and exposes their own summaries to the understanding of other readers or people who have not done the reading.

Also, the summaries do not necessarily need to be narrative – even though that provides useful opportunities to develop as an academic writer. Creating outlines, mind maps and concept maps can be just as valuable and often going back and forth between the narrative and structured summary can lead to much deeper cognitive engagement.

Another important aspect of academic reading is personal interaction. Practicing academics will often approach a text following or in preparation for a conversation about the topic. This could be with peers, students or often the author of the text themselves.

Choosing Tools

Reading tools are not necessarily the best for doing extensive writing. So it may not be the most important aspect to look at. But some tools such as Zotero make it possible to write comments of entire readings rather than simply annotating individual sections.

Because no tool is going to be most effective in all aspects of the intensive and extensive work required of an academic reader, the reader may have to sacrifice some productivity and ease of interconnectedness and not chose a tool that is both good at reading and taking notes. For example, an external knowledge management tool like Obsidian, Notion may be a better way to store insights even if the connection to the text read is not automatically maintained.

Equally, the reader may choose to handwrite notes or draw mindmaps which they then keep separate from their reading annotations.

This and the following aspect of academic reading are probably the least well supported by reading tools. Some reading apps such as MarginNote or LiquidText allow for connecting notes and highlights into exportable mindmaps. Yet, they may break other aspects of the reading such as keeping track of references.

But because the interaction with the ideas does not just happen in the text itself, the academic reader may want to seek out conversations among others – this used to be limited to conferences, seminars, etc. However, now they may choose video or audio recordings of conversations (YouTube recordings of lectures or podcast interviews with book authors). This will give them further avenues of understanding.