Read Smarter, Not Harder

As a professor, I was all about making academic rules explicit to make them accessible to everyone. It’s hard, if not downright impossible, to know what to do and feel confident doing it when you also feel like you don’t know what is expected of you. As far as I’m concerned, making some of these hidden rules more transparent is one of the best ways to combat imposter syndrome (AKA that sinking feeling that you don’t really belong, or you’re not good enough to “make it” at the school that admitted you).

Imposter syndrome hit me hard when I started at Harvard. One of the things I wish I had known when I started graduate school was how to read smarter, and not harder. Each week, I spent hours upon hours reading the articles and chapters that had been assigned, taking copious notes on each one. And then I showed up at class and had nothing to say. Or, I managed to get in a few points about the reading during the in-class discussion about it, but I never picked up the article again, so I later regretted having spent 3 or more hours practically memorizing it.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was reading the wrong way. I was reading as if there was going to be a quiz on the content of the reading itself. Now, for some classes and some subjects (e.g., art history or languages), this may be the case but, most often, your professors will want you to do more with a reading than simply absorb it enough to parrot it back—they’ll want you to think deeply about it, and you can start accomplishing this from the get-go.

Those pages upon pages of notes I took on every source that was assigned to me? I was treating each part of the reading as if it were equally important—yet that is rarely the case. By reading the syllabus, the assignment prompts, and any handouts given to you by your professors, you can likely glean what they think is most important about a reading or why they assigned it (or this is something you could ask about in Office Hours!). Moreover, you yourself might have varying goals for why you’re reading a particular source and what you hope to get out of it, depending on why you took the course. All of the above should influence not only how much time you spend on a reading but also the way you engage with it.

Do you need to write about the reading later? Or do you just need to know enough about it to participate in a class discussion? That’s the first question I’d ask myself were I back in high school or college and facing a mountain of assigned reading. If you know you’re likely to write about a source later in the semester, the time you spend reading it, absorbing its arguments, and taking notes to distill your thoughts and leave yourself breadcrumbs is time well spent.

If you’re not likely to write about a source later but you do need to know enough about it to conduct yourself well during a class discussion, well, I have a tip for that too: Make notes that will help you participate in class. Sometimes you need to summarize an author’s point for your own understanding, but rarely will you be asked to reiterate exactly what an author has said in class (well, this might be the first question the professor asks, but the discussion will likely move on quickly from there). Make sure your notes go beyond summary! By the time you get to class, everyone else has read the source too—if your notes only summarize the main points, but don’t add an interesting ‘take,’ they won’t be very useful.

Here’s how to avoid finding yourself in class with nothing to contribute to the discussion: Immediately after reading a source, make a few bullet points at the top of your page that list possible contributions you might make in class. Things like:

- Questions to raise for class discussion

- Connections to other readings, historical or current events

- Insights or analysis about the deeper meaning of a text

- Thoughts about the intended audience of the text, the context in which it was written, or the implications of the author’s main

arguments

What should you do if you truly don’t have time to cover all of the reading that’s been assigned to you? When I was in high school, I felt like the amount of work assigned to me exceeded what I was actually capable of keeping up with, and from my understanding homework has only become more intense as the years have gone on. (For those of you still in high school, it might help to know that it got way easier for me to keep up with the workload in college and graduate school due mainly to the fact that by then you spend far fewer hours sitting in class and thus have more “free” time to devote to homework.)

Covering the readings assigned to you is one of your main responsibilities as a student, but you’re only human. You’re going to encounter days or weeks when you simply can’t do all of the reading. When this happens, my best advice is to choose a length of time that sounds reasonable, based on what your schedule looks like, how dense the reading is, and how important it is to the course overall (e.g., will you have to write about it later? Are you going to be tested on it? Or do you just need to know enough to get through a class discussion on it and then it goes away?). Set a timer and spend just that much time on each reading. Get as much out of it as you can (hey, something is better than nothing!) and forgive yourself for not being able to do it perfectly.

This might look like making a little chart with the readings you have to do, sitting up straight with your pen at the ready, reading each source for 20 minutes and then giving yourself a check mark after you “finish” each one. In this case, “finish” means that you spent whatever time you could allot to the reading processing the material, pulling from it what seems most important given the aims of the assignment, jotting down two or three things you can say about the reading in class, and then moving on.

In a perfect world, perhaps you would always have all of the time you need to read everything assigned to you from start to finish. However, part of being a student is learning not just the content of the readings, but also strategies for learning and making your way in the world. Managing your time and learning to evaluate your assigned readings to prioritize what’s most important about them is a valuable part of that process.

Happy reading!