- Welcome.

Just about every college student

will need to read and write.
The basic activities in many college classes boil down
to reading a text, thinking about the text,
and then writing about it.
Of course it becomes much more nuanced than that,
but the cycle of reading, thinking, and writing
is fundamental to any course in the humanities
and social sciences.
Although we're all used to reading, thinking, and writing,
performing these tasks the way they're meant to be done
in a college classroom takes practice.
These are learned skills, nobody's born knowing how to read
a scholarly article or how to write an academic essay,
but everyone can learn how to do these things
by employing good strategies and by practicing
with the specific goal of incremental improvement.
At some point in college, it's very likely that you'll
encounter a hard reading assignment,
a text that you just don't understand.
Could be a book of ancient philosophy,
a new scholarly article, a poem, almost anything.
The text is written in English and you speak English,
but you still don't get it, even if you read it
over and over again.
The bad news is that this is likely,
very likely, in fact, it's a virtual certainty.
The good news is that it happens to everyone,
which means you don't need to worry that you're the problem,
you don't need to worry that you're just incapable
of doing this.
Instead, you simply need to learn some skills
that will prepare you for the moment
when you need to interact with a difficult text.
Since this problem is so common, we wanna offer some
strategies that can help almost anyone
with almost any kind of hard reading.