This fall, I’m going to be teaching my Public Policy Analysis class (as per usual), but I promised the 4 cohorts of our Bachelors in Public Policy that I would give them a few tips on how to read better/faster/absorb the material more easily/in-depth. I had noticed that my blog had fewer resources for undergraduate students than I would like. This is an oversight that I’d like to fix throughout the fall and perhaps in 2020. This series of blog posts on reading techniques for undergraduates is an attempt to “beef up” my Resources for Undergraduates page.
This blog post describes a heuristic I use when I am reading under time pressure and two other conditions apply: what I am reading is a key piece for what I’m working on, and it’s not structured in a way that would allow me to do an AIC (Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion) content abstraction. What I do then is, I screen the paper (I also said “comb” on Twitter, because what better metaphor than sifting through, combing or screening?) for keywords or specific phrases or terms that are relevant.
The paper I am reading right now is a book chapter in the following edited volume: Guha-Khasnobis, Basudeb, Ravi Kanbur, and Elinor Ostrom. “Linking The Formal And Informal Economy: Concepts And Policies”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
This is a chapter on informality, important for a paper I am working on, but not THE key reading for my work. This is what I call a piece worthy of “meso-level” reading (i.e. because I don’t have the time to really read this paper in great depth and it is not the most important one for my research, I will need to scan the text for keywords so that where I see definitions or explanations of these concepts, I can stop and read more deeply). I show my heuristic in the following Twitter thread.
Given that I’m writing a paper on informal waste pickers, knowing the early critiques of the formal/informal dichotomy would be useful to me. I do a backward citation tracing exercise and find Bromley 1978. pic.twitter.com/FFI84hBWbR
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 12, 2019
It takes GK et al up until page 4 to make their core point (two different ways of looking at formality and informality) – but that’s good because now I have identified two ways in which I may assess formality or informality (distance from government and organization type) pic.twitter.com/sceCe8yF1r
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 12, 2019
Repeating this process (scanning sections for key ideas) makes my reading more efficient, and my summarizing better. I can drop my marginalia into my Everything Notebook https://t.co/FPW14R3ziP, an index card https://t.co/RppZJmtqa7 or even Cornell Notes https://t.co/X7TtvQWnaT
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 12, 2019
As I have said in this blog post https://t.co/8m3hn30BPX and in earlier threads, I totally recognize that it's challenging to identify a core idea if authors don't start their paragraphs with topic sentences. But developing heuristics to scan for key ideas is a useful skill.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 12, 2019
I summarized the whole formal/informal definition on one side of an index card (bibliographic reference at the top). I prefer to write just on one side of an index card, but many people continue on the back. pic.twitter.com/3KNxAiKSsA
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 12, 2019
On the theoretical/conceptual level, I really love this book / it’s a volume that studies policy interventions in the informal sector, a topic I’ve studied for years. The assumption of formalization as a strategy for development is exactly an assumption. It needs to be tested.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 12, 2019
</end thread>
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) July 12, 2019
As my Twitter thread shows, my heuristic consists of scanning the text for keyword definitions, explanations, key phrases, lists of concepts, ideas, etc. Then I highlight the text that is important to me, and I leave the rest for a second, “at a later time” read. Hopefully this heuristic will help my (and others’) undergraduate students read faster and absorb the material better!
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