A good reading list will often be one that gives you lots of different opinions on a topic. You might not realise this at first, but there will be disagreement amongst academics about the topic. As a critical reader it is your job to draw connections between these.

There are many ways you can situate your ideas in their context. The first step whenever you are trying to put your readings into a conversation with each other is to re-read your notes. It might have been a few days, or even weeks, since you read some of your texts! Re-reading can help you find new connections that didn’t appear at first. This will be the case because your understanding will be far greater than before! Some students suggest that it is a good idea to print of all your notes, then work through them systematically using a highlighter, taking bullet-points of key details and arguments as they appear.

What is key here is that you are re-reading your notes not the original text. This is one reason why taking notes is so important. If you only highlight within a text, then you need to go back to the original, and it is much harder to focus in on this critical analysis of the information! It is also much more time-consuming!

How you use your notes will of course depend on the strategies you choose. Irrespective of what note taking method you use, it can prove helpful to take the essay question you’re answering and try and imagine what each of your authors would say it about it. Which authors would agree with each other, and who would disagree? You could do this by writing a short paragraph, or a series of bullet points, each detailing this. Your table from the previous task could prove helpful when doing this.

Alternatively, sometimes texts may conflict in more specific ways. Sometimes a study may argue one thing, for example that a good diet is very important for recovery from a sports injury, but another study directly rejects that, perhaps by referencing some new evidence that proves there is no connection between diet and injury recovery. If you spot a disagreement make a note of it as it could prove very useful when you are writing your essay. Ultimately. when you are reading critically, you want to generate a debate between what you’ve read. As you will see in the following section on critical writing, this is very useful when trying to come to your own opinion.

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