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Cole J. Hyatt

Professor Cassandra Phillips

Introduction to Academic Reading

10 October 2022

Strategies for College Reading

College reading has been a journey for me. As I started I believed that I had a full understanding

of college reading. I soon learned this was not true. When you learn that the reading I used to do was

much simpler than I thought it morphs how I think about reading. Before I would read, maybe take a few

notes and never look back and steal a few quotes. Now I read, write notes, and summarize the piece. I

take notes and then look back and re-explain why I took the notes I did. This is how I analyze the piece, if

I simply reread the piece I will have gained no new knowledge, but this method helps me dig deep into

my understanding. Reading once should, if you take notes, give you all the information you need then it is

looking through those notes that shows if you really digested what you read. One strategy I am trying to

work into my reading is to procrastinate less. As I am writing this I am currently behind my schedule I

had laid out for finishing this essay. I suffer from attention deficit disorder. This makes it very hard for

me to sit down and work. To help myself work through this I set alarms with built in breaks, sadly I

ignored one of my work periods and took a very long break. I want to increase my self-control because

that will make reading long papers or writing essays much easier for me to break apart into easy to digest

chunks.

A strategy I would love to work into my writing is to work writing for a purpose better. With this

piece I had a hard time writing initially because I did not really know who or what I was writing for, then

I broke it down. Corrine E. Hinton writes about this strategy in her piece “So You’ve Got a Writing

Assignment.” Hinton writes “ On the surface, it may seem like the instructor is simply asking you to

answer some questions to demonstrate that you understand the material or to compare and contrast

concepts, theorists, or approaches. However, assessing knowledge is usually just one reason for the

assignment. More often than not, your instructor is also evaluating your ability to demonstrate other
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critical skills. For example, she might be trying to determine if you can apply a concept to a particular

situation, if you know how to summarize complex material, or if you can think critically about an idea

and then creatively apply that thinking to new situations.” This type of thinking is what leads us down a

path where we truly get to understand what we are doing with our writing. At first I viewed this

assignment as busy work or a way to have a midterm portfolio with more than one piece. Now I see that it

is a way to see if we can wield these writing strategies as tools to write an essay about what is their most

basic use writing an essay and one at that that is hard to understand the purpose of. I have adapted this

into this piece. Most of my writing speaks from a very objective point of view, but since here I am talking

about myself instead I have adapted and have adapted a more casual writing style. The other strategy I

want to weave into my writing is figuring out if I need argument. This may seem like a simple question,

but in this piece I could make an argument about how I have grown and here is how and why, but I think

instead I did not and could simply talk about my experience writing and how I want to write. Hinton

writes about this as well, “Perhaps one of the most important things to know is whether or not your

instructor is asking you to formulate and support an argument. Sometimes this is easy to determine. For

example, an assignment many instructors include in their courses is a persuasive paper where you’re

typically asked to choose an issue, take a position, and then support it using evidence. For many students,

a persuasive paper is a well known assignment, but when less familiar assignment genres come up, some

students may be confused about argument expectations.” This may seem as she says to be a very simple

task, but when the topic is put before you with a very broad sweeping topic it can be a challenge to see the

essay you will create within that piece. We know that professors are not always the best at writing

instructions and when you are like me and do not want to ask, it helps to break down exactly what they

want. Overall I want to become a better writer and to do that I need to adapt new strategies and Hinton

shows why those are crucial to use.