5.3 The Concept of Active Reading 1

Stop Doing This!

Now that you have started acquiring the "prior art", i.e. the primary and secondary sources of relevance to your subject, you have to learn how to read them. Contrary to what you were taught in elementary school, we are not talking about the lining up of letters that form words. 

There is one way or reading, which is unfortunately widespread in particular among college students, that from now on you have to relegate exclusively to your reading of "Sports Illustrated", "Cosmopolitan" or "Popular Mechanics":

On the night before some reading assignment is due, you have the TV or the Stereo running, some friends are ordering pizza and discussing the football results, and you quickly have to prep for class by taking the casebook and a yellow highlighter and, between some text messages from your boyfriend/girlfriend, you mark everything that you have read. Sound familiar? Well, at least in class it looks as if you have done your reading. After all, you have thoroughly painted the book. But you know what you have actually done? Nothing! Yes, absolutely nothing worth doing. In all honesty, you have not engaged with the text on any intellectual level at all. Your eyes wandered over it but if you had to talk about what was in the text and how it relates to certain arguments or ideas, your brain would draw a blank. If and when called upon in class, you would probably scramble to find some buzzwords among all the highlighting to pass off as if you had at least read, if not understood, the material.

Do yourself a favor and stop this kind of waste of time once and for all. You are better off not underlining or highlighting all the stuff you are reading because if you highlight everything you really highlight nothing. You just change the color of the paper. Your intellectual ability to seriously participate in a (class) discussion of the material does not change from such kind of "reading". You would be better off keeping the book crisp and clean so that you can sell it at the end of term "Like New", and partying with your friends for real. You are anyways not going to be competitive in this field...

Of course, you would then also have to admit that it is YOUR fault and YOUR fault alone, if the job market turns out less welcoming than your parents had hoped.