Robert Frederick Blum. Girl Reading. 1883. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for first-year undergraduates in literary studies is the sudden arrival of the secondary source. High school arts teachers generally encourage students to analyze texts firsthand, and with good reason. At this stage, the important thing is to encourage students to think about the novel on its own terms. At the university level however, this expectation shifts, particularly in upper-year seminars and graduate school. Before contributing to the literature, the professional scholar must survey the field to learn what others have said on the subject.

But academic texts can be challenging for undergraduate students. When I began writing longer essays, in my own undergraduate program in English, I was completely bewildered by scholarly articles. Most of them were written in prose so difficult I couldn’t follow their reasoning. They often presupposed the reader had deep knowledge of the subject at hand and made casual reference to thinkers and terms unfamiliar to me. They appeared to exist in a complex, densely interconnected web of information to which I had no access. When I began teaching English, I realized my own students were similarly intimidated. Many of them didn’t understand how to access secondary scholarship or evaluate the integrity of a source, and so their essays were rife with claims from dubious online webpages. When they did refer to scholarship, they would often misinterpret the underlying argument or misuse the terminology, though not for lack of effort.

The truth is that scholarly essays follow their own imperatives. They can be circuitous, subtle in their implications, exploratory rather than explanatory. Lucidity, in other words, is not always the aim. As Walt Whitman put it, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

JSTOR is an invaluable resource for teaching university students how to locate and interpret secondary sources. In my classes, I show students how to use their institutional credentials to access scholarly databases like JSTOR. Once logged in, I guide them through the search process, tweaking the parameters to surface pertinent results. Then, for an assignment, I task them with finding an interesting article, ideally published in a reputable scholarly journal, relating to the week’s novel or poem. They must highlight, annotate, and ultimately summarize the article into a clear explanatory paragraph, either by hand on a printout or using a digital tool like Kami. These three techniques build valuable research skills and start to acclimate the students to the conventions and methodology of scholarly writing.

Highlighting

Highlighting is a tried-and-tested method when it comes to reading comprehension. Simply mark out the most important sentences in a paragraph, paying special attention to recurring terms and crucial explanations. However, this approach comes with a few caveats. The Learning Center at the University of North Carolina finds that slipshod highlighting can lead to an “illusion of competence,” i.e. the feeling that we know more than we really do. Luckily, there are a few ways to prevent this:

  • Be selective—highlighting everything on the page is as useful as highlighting nothing
  • Be sure that the sections you’re highlighting are, in fact, the crucial claims and observations of the paragraph, and not just the easiest to understand
  • Remember that when you reread, your eye will immediately return to these sentences 

Ultimately, highlighting on its own is a practice with limited utility, but it becomes much more helpful when paired with a liberal use of annotations.

Annotation

This is where your higher-order conceptual thinking comes into play. Don’t veer away from confusion—the annotation is your machete for hacking through the thorny thickets of scholarly analysis. Use it to parse complicated sections, unintuitive claims, and dense language in the article. Questions can also be helpful here, informing your overall approach to the subject matter. Students should ask themselves, “What does this mean? How are these related?” A good practice is to come back and amend your notes as you go on, answering these questions where possible (herein lies the main benefit of digital as opposed to manual markup). Annotated sections may be helpful to discuss as a class.

Annotations are also helpful to signal how scholarly essays are organized. Such essays tend to lack headings or sections, but nevertheless adhere to some kind of internal structure. Notes like “defines the argument—first example—second example” are always useful, particularly when accompanied by a brief roundup of the pertinent claims and observations.

Summary

When referring to an academic article in your own work, two levels of summary are valuable. The first is a paragraph-long outline of the article, which unpacks the terminology, examples, and reasoning. The ability to paraphrase is a key skill here. When unsure about the meaning of a particular passage, students have a habit of dropping in long, verbatim quotations from the source material. I encourage them, instead, to try their best to rephrase and—more importantly—distill the article into its key claims and features. Students who can do this effectively show higher-order engagement with course readings. The goal is to persuade students to stop “parroting” scholarship and internalize it, instead, so that they can deploy it in their own work. The challenge is to find a balance between accuracy and brevity.

The second useful level of summary is further distilling the article into a single sentence or phrase. This is helpful when you need a shorthand for the work of a theorist or thinker. For example, “Walter Benjamin’s argument that a work of art is spiritually degraded by capitalist reproduction” or “Edward Said’s searing critique of Western cultural imperialism.” This technique is helpful both analytically and stylistically when it comes to writing essays. An elegant précis not only flows better than a clunky block quote, it allows the student to spend more of their word count developing their own, original ideas.

Questions

To aid with this process of highlighting, annotating, and summarizing, there are some key questions that might act as an overarching guide:

  1. What is the central argument or concern of this essay?
  2. Does the author use particular examples to prove their argument? Which texts or art objects are referenced?
  3. What are this author’s main influences—which other works or thinkers does the author rely on for this argument?
  4. What key terms does the author use, and how might you define them?
  5. How is the essay structured? What are its sections? How and where does the author move from one to the next?

Other uses

I use these techniques to teach my students how to approach academic articles, but these are also skills that will remain useful throughout their time in higher education. There are times in graduate school that call for the ability to rapidly grasp an entire scholarly tradition, for example. A combination of canny skimming, highlighting, and note-taking over the course of a few days won’t make you an expert, but it will help you gain a working knowledge of your topic that you can use to write a reasonably well-informed and original inquiry. I still run into the occasional scholarly essay that defies casual comprehension, but these days, armed with a highlighter, I know how to go about taming the beast.

To further support developing students’ research and literacy skills and refine your teaching approach, try applying these techniques in your own course. Have you found an effective method for tackling complex academic texts? Share your tips and best practices with fellow educators on JSTOR platforms. Let’s keep the conversation going!

About the author

Richard Joseph is a PhD candidate at McGill University, where he studies contemporary American literature.