Reading more than just Shakespeare

Sometimes people tend to think that English majors just read poetry and Shakespeare all day. Truth is, there is some of that, but there is also a lot of theory that you have to read -- especially at the graduate level. The theory can be simple conceptual stuff, but it can also be incredibly dense.

In my undergrad work, I honestly didn't read a lot of theory and I started my second college experience at a disadvantage. I am learning new methods for comprehending this dense material every day. So far, I have taken the approach of reading it one paragraph at a time and assessing mentally whether I comprehended it. Before grad school, that worked pretty well. Now, I am reading even more dense material and I need to approach it in a new way. Dr. Young in our class on Monday had people share their methods, so I am trying to incorporate some of those into my readings.

One method that nearly all of the students use is writing down summaries of the material on the book itself. I love books, so the thought of damaging them really upsets me. I am trying to let go of my fears a bit, by using pencil. That way I am not being too permanent in my damage, but I am still working my way through the material. I also incorporated writing my summaries of each paragraph down. I have only read one of the two essays assigned for this week, but I did comprehend it really well. I tackled the short one first, so I will see how it goes with the 15 page article here in a little bit.

Now, that was about reading and not necessarily writing, but one other thing about English majors is that you almost always have to write something each week about what you read. So the method of writing down explanations of each paragraph should make my weekly writing that much easier to grasp.

If I would just stop writing here, I can get down to it.