A woman sits in bed with a blanket over her, supported by pillows. She is holding up a book and you cannot see her face.

At first, academic reading may be challenging and stressful, after all it’s something new to you! Despite this, it is absolutely crucial you keep that anxiety in check. If you are thinking about how hard it is, how stressed you are, or how this is the hardest thing you’ve ever done, you’ll take nothing in. Have a break, a cup of tea, or try a little mindfulness. If you aren’t in the right headspace, the task of academic reading will feel far harder than it needs to. Often the trickiest part of academic reading can be convincing yourself that you can do it!

Whilst you have the ability to read academically, perfecting it does require some practice. When we sit down to read academic texts it can often feel like we are looking at a sea of words that don’t connect to anything normal. This is a very common response for new (and even older) students to have! Every academic discipline has its own particular vocabulary that you will progressively get used to with time, which means it can be challenging to engage with at first.

The important thing, at this stage, is that you don’t need to understand absolutely everything. You may not understand a particular statistical analysis used in a journal article about physiotherapy (as you haven’t been taught it yet!) or you might not quite grasp how Karl Marx’s philosophy connects to a particular issue in your primary education degree. These are normal experiences all students (and even academics reading outside of their discipline) have. Therefore, when you are first setting out in your university career, academic reading will be all about taking what you can from a piece of writing. It will be about understanding what that statistical analysis showed us about an issue in physiotherapy, or what Marx’s theory helped an author conclude about primary education.

Over time, as you get more confident, and more knowledgeable in your subject, you will see the jigsaw puzzle of academic reading in your discipline come together. For now, it's about taking away as much as you can from a piece of assigned reading.

Next, we set out some techniques you can try for yourself as well as some useful information about academic texts themselves.

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