There is one useful and meaningful thing that I learned from the past two weeks. The assignment, "Week 2 close reading practice", inspired me a lot. The strategies that I learned from this assignment help me a lot with the first goal in the "course objectives": developing good habits for engaged reading. Personally speaking, I am not a very patient reader which means I could not sit down and read an article or story for a really long time. The reason of this habit might be that I feel boring or tired when I read some long article for a long time. However, the strategies of this assignment render me to think of something which I have never thought of before. For example, the first strategy of this assignment is prediction. "only look at the title and the headings of the article and predict what this article mainly discuss." This strategy keeps the passion of me and I am always looking forword to watch what will happen next.
There is an another thing that I learned from the "Week 2 close reading practice". In the assignment, I have been told to ask questions when I am not able to understand some point of views or I am curious about something which is not mentioned in the article. This strategy not only makes me curious all the time and perfectly matches the first goal of the "coure objectives"(develop good habits for engaged reading), but also develop another goal of the "coure objectives" (developing effective habits for my own writing process). Through the process of asking questions, I would be more familiar with the whole article and collect more details of the article.
Here are the three screenshots of what I did in this assignment. Predicting the main idea form the very beginning of the article and asking questions where I do not fully comprehend help me to know and understand this article better.
Hi Abe! I also have a hard time reading because my mind likes to dose off in the middle of boring text. I agree that guessing what text would be about based on the title makes reading a bit more fun. I think this strategy works for me because it forces you to finish the reading to see if you're right.
Hi, Abe. The reading strategies provided by the reading assignments are also very helpful to me. My favorite strategy is to connect the content of the article with my own life, because it allows me to understand the article better.
I can relate to what you said that you "could not sit down and read an article or story for a really long time.", especially for those academic papers that we are not very familiar with.