Rosenberg Thought piece

            While reading the essay, I found it very ironic that I was reading a scholarly source on how to read scholarly sources. To be honest, I found myself dozing off midway through like the author described early in the paper.  I had to glue my eyes open to continue on, because like her, I have a hard time staying interested in these types of texts. Once Rosenberg got into the actual “meat” of her work, I realized I better start paying attention and following some of her rules on, not only reading, but understanding scholarly writing. From then on, all I could do was relate what I was reading in her article to me focusing and using most of those tactics on the article itself. For example, upon reaching the conclusion of “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources”, in the back of my mind, I was thinking I’d skip because there’s typically nothing new in the conclusion of a paper. But then I thought back to what I had already read in the previous section. I had to shake my finger and tell myself, “No, no, no. The author might reveal a new way to look at her main argument, which can help me further understand it. So no skipping!”

            So that’s exactly what I did, I didn’t skip the conclusion. I read the article through, from front to back (even though Rosenberg advised against that and breaking it up into parts). Another method I picked up on while reading the article was how, as readers, we are supposed to wonder what kind of audience the article was intended for, and why the professor wanted you to read it. Obviously in this case, the audience was for the sleep-deprived college student, swamped with uninteresting reading assignments, who always ended up falling asleep mid-read. Which is who I, also, find myself guilty to be. Along with that, I discovered why our teacher had assigned us to read this particular article—to prepare us for when we read the scholarly writings in our own field, in which we will be writing a summary for one of our major assignments. This way, we are prepared to see (and ignore) a lot of jargon that means nothing to us right now, to know a lot of useful information will be found in the abstract (where it is okay to look up the words because it might help you later), and to not skip the conclusion, like I probably would’ve done if not for what I had read in the section right before her own.