<p>What's the best way to devour large amounts of reading for class? Between Lit Hum, University Writing, Intro to Poli Sci, and other classes, I feel like it's impossible to finish reading the entire text at a deep enough level and retain all the information for class discussion. Most people I know either don't do the reading at all, or camp out in the library attempting to actually read the whole thing...especially when it's like, "Read the second half of the Iliad by next class...." </p>
<p>What's the most effective way to do ENOUGH of the reading to understand it at an insightful level but not have it take up all your free time? Also, I've heard that you should "read for argument," but how exactly do you do that? </p>
<p>I feel for you. But I can’t think of any magic shortcut that would let you cut down on the time you need to comprehend and make judgment on the reading. </p>
<p>I guess the only thing I can say is that read selectively – skim over it, and if a part catches your interest, reread it/read if thoroughly so that you can retain that for discussion. Past that I don’t know. I also have trouble reading stuff at a level adequate for discussion purposes.</p>
<p>The problem I always have is that I feel I don’t have enough time…but I do. Like currently, I should be doing work, yet I’m not. There are always those short periods of time where we think we don’t have enough time to do sufficient work, so we delegate our time towards something else (usually less productive). Use those short periods of time to do as much as you possibly can. Trust me, even reading the Illiad for 10 minutes at Road Runner’s pace will do wonders for your work ethic.</p>
<p>Also, ff you somehow try to make the class and reading material more interesting, you’ll find you read the material faster and it is more enjoyable. Surely, you can’t just decide to like a class if you don’t like it, but try and find something about it that makes it more interesting and pertinent to you.</p>
<p>And yeah, there was a NYT article (I think it was NYT) about how there is a huge Ritalin scene at Columbia. All the kids buy it from ADHD kids to pull all-nighters. Damn, those ADHD kids must be making a fortune</p>
<p>For LitHum, I’d recommend aggressively skimming it and only underlining what seem like critical passages during the week, and maybe going back and reading some parts thoroughly on the weekends. For any class that focuses on debates/discussions/arguments (for me, philosophy; for you, maybe poli/sci?), then you need to understand the speaker’s perspective and arguments. If you’re given a handout, read it carefully and make notes in the margins explaining and summarizing each of the writer’s arguments. If you’re given a book to read, skim it and annotate the most important arguments.</p>
<p>Ritalin/Adderall are only supposed to increase your focus (I wouldn’t know as I’ve never tried either). While it might help you get through a massive amount of reading, I’m not sure if you’ll retain your knowledge. It’s also supposed to help you write papers, not because it helps you synthesize knowledge better but merely because it forces you to focus on the paper. The biggest problem that I (and many other Columbia students I’ve talked to) have with writing papers is that I can’t focus. I have an idea of what I want to say and the arguments I want to use, but I have trouble actually putting it on the page. Ritalin is supposed to help with that, and I presume that training yourself to write and practicing writing papers should have the same effect.</p>
<p>Eliminate the voice in your head that reads the text along with you. It’s a JFK technique - at least, that’s what the guy who taught me the trick told me.</p>
<p>I’ve been doing it for a whole and it’s helped me speed up my reading quite a bit without sacrificing retention.</p>
<p>I’ve taken Adderall before, and while I felt like I had superhuman focus, I later felt like I was going to die and was afraid of going to sleep because my heart rate felt phenomenally high and I was freaking, wondering if I would be one of those one-offs you always hear about in scare-tactic anti-drug campaign commercials, “It was Jenny’s first time and she OD’d.” I also wasn’t taking it for school. I just wanted to try it. I ended up driving to a friend’s house four hours away in the middle of the night and playing Rockband for 16 hours straight, all because I had the urge to play when I took the pill: that’s how powerful.</p>
<p>I’m not going to say I’m against pills just because, because I feel drugs are a societal norm by now and we just tend to ignore those we’ve been socialized to accept (caffeine, sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.) I will say, though, that the juice may not be worth the squeeze. I especially would advise against taking a pill regularly to get through reading assignments… these kinds of concentration-increasing drugs can be highly addictive and rife with side effects. I remember having the driest mouth ever after after my small bout… not to mention the feeling that I was about to have a heart attack at 23.</p>
<p>Then there’s my friend’s advice: “Wait until grad school before even considering yourself in need of altered states of consciousness. A dissertation on deadline month will make the Iliad look like a Chuck Palahniuk novella.”</p>
<p>There is an old classic on reading, Mortimer Adler, How to read a book. Adler is famous for the core curriculum in Chicago and is one of the authors of the Lifetime Reading Plan. Anyone interested in reading for pleasure or profit will find this book a gem.</p>