Reading Journal Articles

"Meandering reading" occurs when you mechanically read through a text before becoming lost in it; after about ten minutes of aimless reading, you find yourself asking, "What did I just read for the past ten minutes?" Such moments tend to arise when readers are not engaged with the text in an active way. They simply pulled along by the words, sentences, and paragraphs on a page in passive ways rather than dictating the reading process in active ways.

Students need to read silently, to avoid tracing the lines of a text as one reads the text, but to "run their fingers down the left-hand margin of the text to encourage the quicker movement of their eyes down the page." Such a vertical movement "increases their reading speed overall." Students should "practice as often as possible under timed conditions and complete comprehension questions and/or write summaries" in order to ensure they have understood the text.

In the preceding reading method, readers necessarily have to sacrifice comprehension for speed. But, there is nothing wrong with slowing down the reading process. If you cannot get through the readings because you have too much of them, then you need to prioritize your life so that you can devote the appropriate amount of time to your studies - not move your fingers up and down pages to increase your reading speed. It is much better to read slowly and actively. The insertion of the reading codes at the left and right margins is meant to actively engage you in that dialogue with the text.

The reading codes describe the textual function of various sentences and paragraphs within the context of journal articles. Journal articles are not organized in formless ways; instead, they are organized in predictable and expectable ways. Once you understand how a journal article is structurally organized and the work done in it, you will be able to understand the content of the readings and avoid meandering reading.

For instance, most journal articles contain an abstract, introduction, literature review, data and methods, results, discussion and conclusion, and a reference section. The Results or Findings (the main findings of an article) appear in three places: the abstract, the results section, and the discussion and conclusion section. They are repeated three times within one paper because they represent the most important part of a journal article - they are the "golden nuggets" as they represent what the article is "about" and because the results dictate the citational authority of a paper. Primarily, one cites an author based on her main findings/results, not other parts of the paper.

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