This post takes its inspiration from something I’m working on in one of my upper division courses this semester, which is guiding a group of History majors (and a couple of willing History minors) who are on the cusp of graduating through their first real research project. Like most undergraduates, they’ve written papers for which they’ve done research, but they haven’t done an actual research paper before and I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that there’s not a lot of great stuff out there to guide them through it.
So, as I did with the Grad School Survival Guide … I’m writing some of my own.
From my end (professor), it goes like this: I assign an article or part of a book in a class, and I ask my students what they think of it, and I get blank stares. And like many of my colleagues on the junior ends of things, I get a little frustrated.
What do you mean you don’t have any thoughts on the book?
And then I start thinking about one of the things that I admitted in the post I wrote for what eventually became the Grad School Survival Guide, that this is something:
- I had to learn how to do on my own
- I didn’t actually learn how to do until I was in graduate school …
- … the second time.
So, let me turn this around and imagine that I’m a student being handed an article by a professor who then proceeds to ask me what I thought of it.
The, um, font was pretty?
And the reason for this is that you have to change the way you think about what you’re reading, and also how you approach it.
Now, I’m talking mostly about books here, but if you have an article, keep reading. They’re structured similar to the way that books from academic presses are.
Where books come from and why it matters
You see, when two books love each other very much … (OK, OK, dad joke.)
When you first get to university, you probably encounter the corporately produced textbook. A lot of these are going open source (which I’m not against), but in the liberal arts (and some other fields), you’ll eventually get assigned a book that almost always has a Catchy Title: followed by one, two, or three things that make the title very long.
We’re not here to talk about textbooks, or I’ll be ranting all day and we’ll get nowhere. We’re here to talk about the other books you’re more likely to encounter in an upper division class. The ones you’re asked your thoughts about.
These fall into two categories, which often look very similar: books published by academic presses (these are almost always named for a university, plus a couple of others like Routledge or Bloomsbury), and books published by popular presses (these are names you’ll recognize: Doubleday, Knopf, Penguin, Random House, etc.).
There are different flavors of book: the most common is the monograph, so-called because it has a single author. You may also come across a book jointly written by more than one author, in which it’s not clear who wrote what, or an edited volume, in which each chapter is written by a different person.
Academic presses
For most academics (people with Ph.Ds), the gold standard from our perspective is putting our research out with academic presses. There are many reasons for this, and they are not relevant here. The biggest difference between a book from an academic press and a popular press (other than the cost) is that most books from most academic presses (yes, I’m adding qualifiers so I don’t get loads of comments) go through a process known as double blind peer review. (Most articles in academic journals go through the same process).
This is a process where I, an author, send my manuscript to the publisher who sends it to two reviewers without any information that identifies me as the author. The reviewers read the manuscript and give feedback to the press (“is this book worth publishing?”) and to the author (“this area seems weak, can you find more sources?”) The publisher then sends me their feedback without telling me who they are (hence, the double-blind aspect).
So, academic books have been reviewed (theoretically) by someone who knows something about the subject being discussed and has told the press that the book is worth publishing. The flip side–and the reason I’m telling you about the different kinds of presses–is that most authors don’t actually include “this book was peer reviewed” in their introduction. Occasionally you’ll see a reference to the “anonymous reviewers” in the list of people the author thanks in their intro, but that’s about it.
Popular presses
Popular press books are also reviewed prior to publication, but the process is different. Some academic authors send their manuscripts to them, just structured for a different audience (more on that in a bit). In other cases, the press might seek someone out who knows about a topic they’re keen to publish on, sometimes quickly (hence the number of books that appear after elections and major events–these are solicited by publishing houses because they know people will by them).
Review at popular presses isn’t always blind, and it may also focus more on publishability (“is the book readable and understandable?”) than it does on the quality of the content in the way that an academic press might. This is not to say that books published by popular presses are better or worse (and if your professor assigned it, it’s probably for good reason), but it is something to keep in mind, especially if you’re doing a research project and wandering through the stacks or doing an online search for suitable material.
I have a book in my hand. Now what?
Nearly all academic books have the same structure:
- Presentation of argument
- Historiography
- Plan
This will almost always be in the introductory chapter (which, depending on the press, may be titled “introduction” or Chapter 1). In books published by popular presses, however, the historiography section may appear in the notes.
Academic articles will have a presentation of argument and a historiography; they may be ordered differently, and usually they don’t have a plan because they’re not long enough.
Let’s look at what each of these entail:
Presentation of argument
This is where the author offers their thesis or argument. This is the key difference between a survey book or a textbook and an academic book, and why your instructor has different expectations of what you’ll get out of it: rather than a recitation of facts, the author has compiled material to support their thesis, which is an evidence-driven argument that is presented in the rest of the book.
In the early part of the introductory chapter, the author will give background information, and, in the typical style you learned in high school, will begin to narrow their topic before the thesis statement appears. It will look like:
- [Name of book] argues that …
- In [Name of book], I explore … by …
- a definitive statement that is followed by a lot of persuasive language (“will show”). These are a little harder to find, but you’ll notice that the progression of information stops and there’s a lot of discussion about this sentence.
This is the sentence you want to identify, highlight, write in the margins if it’s your book, etc. This is what the book is actually about. Everything else in the book is the author’s attempt to demonstrate the accuracy of this statement.
Historiography
Shortly thereafter, you will see reference to other scholars, authors, books, and articles. It’s probably not the most interesting section and you’ll be tempted to skip it. If you’re engaging on a research paper or project, though, you really shouldn’t because this section will tell you who else has written on this topic and how the book you’re reading fits in with them: agreement, disagreement, filling in a gap, answering a question posed, etc.
In a book from a popular press, this section is more likely to appear in the notes section at the end of the book, rather than within the text itself.
Historiography, as the name suggests, is specific to the discipline of history: it’s the study of how people have written about history.
The technical name for an in-line (meaning: it appears within the text itself, rather than as an appendix) historiographical section is a literature review. If it’s appended to the end, and shows as a list of books with notes about each title, it’s an annotated bibliography. These two terms are not discipline-specific to history, although their structure and format can differ in other areas of study. If you have to write one, ask your instructor for guidance.
Plan
The plan section is one of the most important sections of the introduction, but it is also the section most students skip right over. This is actually a mistake.
The plan outlines the book, chapter by chapter, and is where the author lays out how they’re going to structure the presentation of evidence in support of their argument. In Chapter 1, I’ll do this. In Chapter 2, I’ll do that. And so on.
This is actually very important if you’re expected to present part of the book in class, because you’ll want to be able to explain how your chapter follows the ones that come before, and sets up the ones that come after. You shouldn’t have to figure it out for yourself!
The rest of the book
I’m not going to cover the mechanics of reading, but a word to the wise: if you’re covering an entire book in one or two class sessions, it’s not likely you’ll be asked to recite data covered on page 84. The discussion is most likely to cover the book’s argument and how well the author did demonstrating their point.
And you can read accordingly: efficiently and quickly. Generally you want to read the chapter introduction and conclusion, and read the first and last sentence of each paragraph; if you don’t understand the progression, then skim the paragraph itself.
Pay attention to the flow of the argument, and don’t be afraid to take note of logic leaps or things that don’t entirely make sense. These are good starting points for discussion in class.
Practice, practice, practice
The easiest way to get used to identifying these parts of a book is practice locating them. Go to the library, pick up a few random titles, and see if you can do it. The more accustomed you become to identifying these structural elements, the easier it will be to get what you need out of a book quickly–and correctly–and also to have an answer when your professor asks what you thought of the reading.
Christopher S Rose 