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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Reading for Structure

It would be a good idea to read several articles just for their form. Read them without paying attention to what they are saying, only looking at how they are put together. To do this it would best to choose articles you aren't very interested in so that you wouldn't be distracted. Look at how the author backs up her claims, how he writes, what kind of signposting she feels the need to use. What his authorial persona is. You could even develop a rubric to judge the article by several measures.

Graduate students read scholarly articles, but they don't tend to read them formalistically as I'm suggesting. Maybe I'll try it myself since I'm recommending it to you.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In one of the best classes I took during the coursework phase of my graduate studies, my professor (who is now my diss. chair) split us into groups and gave each group the introduction to an article. We read and analyzed the intro. individually, and then as a group. Each group did the same with its respective article.

After we had finished the group analysis, each group shared its findings about how its intro. operated. We were, of course, amazed to discover that they all did basically the same things!

I had read a lot of academic articles already at that point in my life, but it took someone putting me through these paces for me to really grasp what a journal article does. This exercise has ended up being extremely formative for me as a jr. scholar.