DawnGleamTurtle

I've had trouble reading academic literature since my undergrad years, and so I gotta say, thank you for this thread. I've been a grad student long enough to have eventually stumbled on the truth that reading every word and treating the text as some sacred fount of knowledge is a load of crap. Furthermore, reading stuff written about a very specific topic tends to cause every intro section to say roughly the same things. This article is definitely helpful. Though I'm not sure how good that last one is -- for me I think I can't really parse text without hearing the word in my mind. If anything, what actually happens is that if I need to read fast I just dart from one part of the paragraph to the next to get a general idea of what's going on from some semi-random selection of words that look important. (Okay, that's not random at all, I admit.) I do sometimes suffer "reader's block" where I sit in front of a paper or two or an entire stack and just keep getting distracted. I can't seem to find any better way to deal with it other than to simply suck it up and read the paper. And I try to tell myself if I've read even a tiny fraction of the content in the paper, it's still better than having read none of it. To some extent, the literature feels a little like a Mega Man game, in that there's a familiarity with the material that would allow me to read these papers smoothly and easily, but I can't get that familiarity without first breaking into this bunch of papers, just like how all the robot masters in Mega Man games have weapons that other robot masters are weak to, but you've just got to get your first robot master weapon with your own default weapon. If anyone's got a better idea than "just read it, as much or as little as you can", please do let me know. Hahah this is hilarious. And quite probably true. Which makes me wonder why people like to be so wordy and put so much into prose. Would be nice if papers were just a large amount of tables, graphs, flowcharts, bullet-point lists, and such, instead of prose. Prose is the most annoying thing to extract information from, in my opinion. Also, long paragraphs. Ugh. Problem is that -- if you're great at critical thinking and poking holes in arguments and especially if you're the type to be very thorough and like to cement your understanding before moving on and also like to make sure you know everything about something in case someone tries to poke holes in what you say about it -- you feel this strong impulse that you're missing something and have to go back and read it or else you won't truly understand it. That feeling -- and the accompanying notion that one has to sit down and get serious with a good chunk of time formally set aside to tackle a major operation known as reading an academic paper, just to be sure that one understands it completely and whole and comprehensively -- is a major contributor to reader's block.

Hi there! Just joined this forum. I'm not a new GMU student, but I am a GMU student (PhD, Environmental Science and Policy). A little disappointed to see no one else here but I guess the thread existing is better than nothing at all!