Rosenburg Thought Piece

Too often, I find myself having to reread entire paragraphs after my mind has wandered off to a place where scholarly writing does not exist and all that matters is what I am going to have for dinner. Academic reading has never been one of my strengths and after reading Rosenburg’s Reading Games, I have come to realize one of my biggest mistakes is treating academic articles like a novel and reading them start to finish, as if there is some big plot twist I am saving until the very end. Rosenburg’s strategy of taking apart the piece and finding the main point is so brilliant that it seems it should be obvious. 

I was especially enthralled with the idea of reading the conclusion before diving  into the rest of the article in order to better understand the introduction and the main point of the writing. It seems so simple and smart that I don’t know how I have gone my whole life without ever trying that. It seems that teachers generally try to help students out and teach them the best way to understand something, so it baffles me that I have never been taught any type of academic reading strategy like that. 

While I have yet to actually apply these strategies, I feel comforted just knowing that I now have a plan to dissect academic writing that always seems so daunting.  Rosenburg’s formula makes an incredibly difficult task a simple, step-by-step process. It makes academic writing less of a monster and more like a math problem; tricky at first, but fathomable when broken down into a series of smaller tasks. 

The outcome of reading academic writing has always seemed somewhat abstract to me. At the end you will come out with some sort of new knowledge, but there is no concrete level of understanding you must reach. Nothing is set in stone. Without a measurable goal, I always found it difficult to know when I was done reading or whether or not I had done what the teacher asked. Rosenburg’s strategies gave me a better understanding of the point of academic reading and an idea of what the outcome of my reading should be.