The Reading Games_thought piece

Admittedly, when I first started reading this my mind went somewhere else. I read this at 9:30 in the morning before my daily dose of caffeine.  I found myself doing everything she described herself doing when she had to read her book on the Chinese revolution.  I spaced out, got sleepy and started questioning why I had to do this.  I always hate having to read for school.  I was that kid in high school English class who wouldn’t read the assigned chapters for homework and then end up figuring out the details of what happened in those chapters during class discussion.  This worked fairly well for me up until the last half of junior year and senior year.  I was never a fast reader and in fact reading to understand in a short amount of time was always my worst skill.  It probably still is.  Reading about how to read academic writing makes me feel more comfortable going forward because I now know how to “read smarter, not harder”. At my high school, we have to write a research paper sophomore and junior year about a social science topic, as well as write one senior year for our English class.  The social science papers were tricky because as a 16 or 17 year old kid, who never had been exposed to academic writing, reading these journals that were at a reading level beyond mine was hard.  I would often just skim the material to see if it had useful information, or I would look at the title to see if it sounded good.  During senior year, the paper we had to write was more opinionated.  The struggle lied in figuring out which ones were creditable and which were not.  Often times, we just google something to find an answer, but when it comes to very specific educational topics; google sucks.  I know for a fact that google tracks your history on what you type into it and it will give you somewhat different results based on what you consistently type into it.  So, you will get slightly different results from someone else because of what you normally look up.  I personally think that this is a real problem for the future.  When we live in the information age, but the information that is more easily accessed is which celebrity is dating who then we have a problem.  Now that I am exposed to academic writing, I know what to expect and I also am relatively good at figuring out what the article is talking about with having limited knowledge on the subject.  Overall, I really enjoyed this article, although it was slow going at first.  It has many useful tips that I would love to have known back in high school for those research papers.