Supercharge Your Academic Reading By Focusing on Concepts

When asked what they annotate when reading, many first-year students will say: “the important stuff.” Ask them what exactly “the important stuff” is and more than a few will confess that they’re not sure. Drawing on reading instruction from their high school years, some will cite the “main idea” or “themes” as important. Others will Read More …

Simplify Complex Sentences for Better Comprehension

Sometimes emerging academic readers find it hard to understand a passage they’re reading because of the complex syntax academic writers sometimes use. Take, for example, this trio of sentences in one of my favorite articles to read with first-year writing students, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” by James Paul Gee (1989 J. of Education 171.1). How Read More …

Describe Your Reading Difficulty – Then Get Help to Solve It

College students sometimes struggle with reading the dense, complex texts assigned to them. Being able to name the difficulty is the first step in overcoming it. Read through this list of reading difficulties to identify which ones fit your situation. Then book a Reading Support appointment through UNE’s Student Academic Success Center to get help. Read More …

Good Summary

Good summaries connect the ideas being summarized to the purpose of your paper As David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen explain, all academic writing has a “thinking component and an information component” (Writing Analytically 7th ed. 75). Skilled writers use summary to convey the information, theories, and observations they want their readers to think about. “Summarizing,” Read More …