The Read: A Presentation on Reading in College

Friday's Child Is On the Edge of Another Semester

Over the years, a fair number of people have found their way to my little essay about reading in college, which periodically gets messed up by WordPress updates. That early blogging artifact pushed me to develop a course on the history of reading, which I haven’t taught for a while. It also led eventually to me doing an annual presentation on reading, often two of them—one to our student peer advisors during their training, and one to incoming first-year students.

I’ve revised that presentation a lot over the years, and it goes well beyond my original blog essay in terms of arguing that the main challenge in mastering college reading is to understand the reasons why there’s as much reading as there is, to develop a discerning understanding of reading within disciplines and in relationship to the intellectual temperament of individual faculty, and to grasp the complex and ever-shifting relationship between cultural capital and being well-read.

I thought I’d post the slides for the current version of this presentation. I usually try to give one example of skimming—here I use a journal article from 1997 that’s from an unusually clear and sharply contrasting debate between two scholars about the history of leisure, and I contrast that with the opening and closing of James Agee’s “A Mother’s Tale” to show the perils of trying to skim some kinds of reading.