How do I know what to pay attention to when I'm reading a source?

To handle the sheer number of pages likely to be assigned in a history course or research paper, you will need to practice strategic reading.  Having a strategy for reading will be useful to you throughout your life as, in virtually any career, you are faced with quantities of information to read.

Being strategic means being active, using your mind to select and organize meaning.  To succeed in this active process, think of the book as living thing, the product of another active mind or minds that are far away and perhaps from another era.  Through the medium of writing, distance and time have been overcome.

Talk back.  Stop your reading after each few paragraphs or pages and ask questions that will make the textbook respond to you.  Then, in your mind, construct the answers, glancing back over the print you've covered.  If you write down these answers, you'll end up with a useful and coherent set of notes.

Forget about what speed-reading experts say.  You're likely to get little out of your reading if you don't stop for these conversations.  As you practice this approach, you should ask questions such as the following:

• What is the main topic or issue here?
• Does the textbook suggest a position or bias?
• Does the topic remind me of anything else I know?
• Do I understand this topic or issue will enough, or do I need to find out more?
• What are the most important concepts or ideas in the passage? Do I understand what they mean?

Understand the Architecture of History

Historians think much like architects.  They build structures out of concepts and facts.  Reading only for the latter is like reducing a house to lumber and nails.  Strategic reading means that you look at the architecture of a text, first at the structure as a whole, and then at the materials from which it is made.  Therefore, you might begin with the design of the book itself, to understand how it represents the writers' structuring of the content of history.  A typical book, for example, will have an elaborate table of contents section that lays out its content informatively, in some combination of time periods and themes.

The same structural principle applies to passages within the textbook.  Usually, each passage contains main ideas, secondary concepts, and supporting details.  This web page will help you identify main ideas from secondary ones.

Questions to ask yourself as you read a paragraph:

1. How can this paragraph be summarized in one sentence?
2. What are the basic elements of this sentence?  
3. How is each of these elements explained or elaborated in the paragraph?
4. What is the main issue in the paragraph?
5. What position does the author take on this issue?  
6. What kind of support does the author give for this position?
7. What outcome or conclusion does the author offer?

These passages were adapted from David Pace and Sharon L. Pugh, Studying for History (New York: Harper Collins College Publishing, 1996).  They are used here with permission from the authors.