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Some Reading Strategies for History Courses: A List of Informal Suggestions |
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| 1
The big picture |
History isn't just about learning facts and dates. It's also about understanding how and why things happened. So don't get bogged down in taking in all the facts and dates, at the expense of the big picture. The key is to ask yourself, "Why would this event be important, and how does it relate to other events?" These questions give you the framework to hang your facts and dates on. This is not to say that you can forget all facts and dates, but it is to suggest remembering them within a meaningful context. | ||||
| 2
The details |
History readings often give you more information than you actually need to remember. Again, here the big picture is important. Authors of historical accounts often include details to make their cases more persuasive or appealing. But on the same principle as above, not all of these details need to be noted down and stored away. | ||||
| 3
Active reading |
History courses often have a lot of reading. Therefore you need to practice active reading. Keep asking yourself, "What is the point of all this? What am I supposed to be getting out of it?" Then organize your reading around answering those questions. Often it helps to scan material quickly to get a sense of what the point is before really getting into it; often it helps to look back over it after reading it to fix the main points in your understanding. | ||||
| 4
Intelligent reading |
History courses use different kinds of materials that demand different kinds of reading. For instance, a narrative of someone's life will probably be quicker and easier to read than a historian's analysis of an event and its reasons. A collection of primary documents will make you ask different questions from a textbook account. | ||||
| 5
Selective reading |
History of physics is burdened by reading materials that can be dense and off-putting. These provide good practice, however, for a useful skill: making sense of texts you do not fully understand. If you get swamped by equations or technicalities, skim along until you understand again. Try to figure out the author's point. Then return to the difficult spot and see how it fits. For many purposes, this level of understanding suffices. | ||||
| 6
Truth and fiction |
History is interpretive. This means that people will sometimes tell different stories about events or attribute different significance to them. When you read history you should keep in mind that the accounts you have before you do not represent the final truth. This does not mean, however, that history (to cite Henry Ford) is bunk. What these accounts represent are the efforts of (usually) intelligent, thoughtful people to make sense of what we can find out about what happened in the past. | ||||
| Copyright © Cathryn Carson 2001 |