Another query from a friend – hopefully they won’t mind me using our discussion as the springboard for a post, because they are not the only person I’ve had this conversation with. Not only that, but I, myself, have been talked off this very same ledge more than once.
It goes something like this. You’re past prospectus, you’re getting reading to embark on research–or perhaps you’re mid research, or even writing your dissertation.
At some point, someone mentions to you–or you see an article, or somehow it is brought to your attention that there is another scholar working on a topic similar to yours.
And you go see what they’re doing.
And you realize their topic sounds familiar.
Very familiar.
And you start to feel like you’re having an out of body experience.
And, at some point, you realize it’s been about twenty seconds since you last inhaled.
Because … they’re doing your topic.
And your palms sweat.
If someone else is doing your topic … then your work isn’t original any more! It’s too late to start over now! I can’t start over! Am I doomed? Is it the apocalypse?
No. No, it isn’t. (Okay, in full disclosure: it may be the apocalypse, but this isn’t why.)
Your work is still original, and so is theirs.
Let’s counter the irrationality of panic and insecurity with some cold hard facts.
You have your sources, your framework, and your theory. No one else has this. Even if the other scholar is looking at the exact same topic as you, the two of you are not going to write the same thesis. It’s just not going to happen. (And if it does, this isn’t the column for you. You need to be looking at pieces on plagiarism and academic dishonesty because that just doesn’t happen).
We put such a premium on the doctoral process involving An Original Piece of Research to The Field that we miss the fact that we’re supposed to be entering a conversation with other scholars. Other people are going to comment on your work. You’re building off of a cadre of scholars who are adjacent to your subfield. And, yes, maybe one of them will know something about your topic too. It’s okay! That’s what academia is all about (or it’s supposed to be, anyway).
But this is a hard lesson to come to. For years, whenever I read anything that came a little too close to my own research my face would start to burn and I’d feel like a fraud. My work isn’t new, I’d tell myself. Everyone knows this. I’m just rehashing old territory.
You’ll feel like this a lot when you’re in the midst of research and writing because you’ve spent so long with the material that it feels like common knowledge. Trust me, it isn’t.
I guarantee the other scholar isn’t using your sources. They have stuff you don’t have. You have stuff they don’t have. And even if you come to the exact same conclusion, you’ll have taken different routes to get there, and both of your works will benefit. Don’t see this as a threat to your own work.
Edit: when I posted this on Facebook, a colleague commented that:
A graduate student emailed me freaking out that I had “beat him” to the topic. Since then, we’ve submitted grant applications together to conduct an expansive oral history project.
Think of the opportunities: conference panels, grants, etc. You’re starting to find your tribe!
Do, however, take steps to protect your own work. I never posted anything dissertation-related online, except for some public history pieces and a very short (10 page) paper I gave at a conference. I’m happy to share my work with interested scholars, but until I’m ready to publish it and put it out there for the world to see, I’m not broad-banding the draft versions. This is just common sense, and I’d recommend it to everyone. You can’t be too careful.
In my next posts in the Grad School Survival Guide, I’ll discuss the process of planning a research year, and how to try to get through it in one piece. Stay tuned!
In the fall of each year, my department had meetings with the students in their first, second, and third year (individually) to discuss benchmarks in the program, student concerns, etc., sort of as a coaching meeting at the beginning of the year.
I was not in my third year when this story took place (in fact, I was in my eighth, and final year), and I had absolutely no intention of attending the third year meeting. I was just looking for a place to drink my coffee before meeting with a new visiting research fellow who also worked on Egypt, and I figured that the fourth floor common area outside the research fellows’ offices would be empty.
I was wrong.
Off I walked from the elevator in my best “I’m not teaching today and don’t have to look pretty” clothes (which is to say, the ones that didn’t have visible stains on them or had been co-opted by the cats as a nest on the floor of the closet) with my headphones in, carrying a paper mug from the ‘bucks and I don’t know what else … and discovered that twenty sets of eyes were watching me do so.
Had I but been naked it would have been a scene from a nightmare.
“Oh, hi.” I said over whatever Scandinavian pop-rock I was into that day blasting into my ears. “Um, can I sit here quietly? I’m meeting someone in twenty minutes.”
And that was when the invitation was offered. “The students are a bit nervous about comps,” said the graduate advisor. “Come offer words of wisdom.”
Trying to wrap my head around the need to be social–I am an introvert. I have learned to be an extroverted introvert, but I still, in my mid-40s, do not react well to discovering that I need to be social when I was not expecting to be–I came and took a seat at the table and asked the assembled group, “So, what about comps is stressing you out?”
It transpired that the students were nervous about the oral component of the comprehensive exams. And herein I said something that made our normally unflappable graduate advisor flinch:
“Oh, orals stressed me out. I was way more stressed about my oral comprehensives than I am about my dissertation defense.”
And, for the record, having now been through my dissertation defense (successfully), let me say definitively: yes, I was much more stressed about my oral comprehensive exams than I was about the defense.
If you are feeling as though this might be the case for you, let me offer this piece of sage wisdom: it’s not just you. And also, relax.
You probably don’t need me to delineate the causes of your stress, but let me boil it down to one simple thing that, for me, fed into all the rest of my comps-related stress: I had absolutely no idea what to expect.
You see, oral comprehensive exams aren’t open to the public. I think they do that so that there’s no additional pressure on the examinee, but I’m not sure that’s actually the end result. By the time I started my doctoral program I had attended a handful of dissertation defenses. I knew what sorts of questions were asked, and I knew what they sounded like when they went well.
Later, I would discover what it sounded like when they did not go well (disclaimer: it wasn’t mine). One defense went so poorly that one of the committee members later apologized to me in her office because she said that “you poor students all looked pretty traumatized, and I want you to know that’s not how things normally go.” There were a lot of extenuating circumstances. I won’t go into it here, as it’s not my tale to tell, but it also served to demonstrate that for things to go that badly at a defense you have to put some effort into it. If your advisor and committee tell you you’re ready to defend, there’s absolutely no reason to lose sleep over the defense.
But … what about comprehensives? I’ve heard of people who don’t pass their comprehensives. What sorts of questions are asked? What does the right answer look like? I mean, this one time at a defense I saw a candidate deflect a question by coolly responding, “That’s an excellent question, but I would have to argue that it’s outside the scope of this project.” And the committee accepted that! Can I do that in comps? (Note: I wouldn’t advise it).
For a long time there was even a prohibition on sharing the written examination questions and essays with colleagues. I don’t know if it’s still in place, but I do know a couple of colleagues who posted their comps portfolios online. In my day, I didn’t even have a sample of what the stupid things were supposed to look like.
You’ll notice that I haven’t written a separate entry about the written comprehensive essays. And this is because they are not one-size-fits-all. Some universities put you in a room and give you x amount of time to do a brain dump of everything you’ve learned. Some give you a couple of days per essay. Mine gives you a month to do all of them. In short: advice that worked for me probably won’t work for you.
I had all my sources and materials at my beck and call. The “short” essay–at 24 pages–had hundreds of footnotes. If you’re locked in a room for eight hours and doing a stream of consciousness data dump of the previous year’s reading based solely on your memory, my advice will be completely useless.
For the written: Paint with big strokes, identify large themes, and write until you’re done. The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate the wide breadth of knowledge you’ve accumulated. The best advice I can give here is to suggest that you treat your written examination as a preparation of the orals. This is a document you’ll be coming back to in that session. Lay out your argument and explanation here.
So. Orals.
There are two very helpful pieces of advice that were given to me about comps.
The first is that the oral exam is that it’s like an Oral Proficiency Interview in a foreign language. Now, if you’re in one of those lucky fields where you don’t have to do these (or you specialize in dead languages), let me explain how these work. The test is designed to determine how high your language ability goes. The key–and often missing–piece of information for the testee is that in order to determine how high your ability goes, the test has to exceed your ability to communicate in that language–in other words, for the test to work, you have to fail.
The conversation will begin with “hello, what is your name?” and proceed through “order this at the grocery story” to “please explain the macroeconomic impacts of Prince Feisal’s plan to develop the natural gas sector of the economy” gradually and slowly over the course of the session. At some point, your vocabulary and/or grammar will run out, and your ability to communicate will break. It’s supposed to, unless you’re a native speaker (in which case, why the hell are you taking a proficiency interview in a language you speak natively?).
Your language aptitude is then measured at the highest level where you were able to perform competently. Some mistakes, but you were able to plow through and make yourself understood despite them.
The comprehensive oral examination is a bit like this. The questions will be probing. You’ll be asked about areas that the committee feels you deviated away from, or didn’t address as fully as they wanted. They’ll push you to defend certain points you made. You might have been wrong once or twice. (These are all things that happened in mine). The idea is to see how much knowledge you built up over the past year and determine that it is Satisfactory.
You will not be asked names, dates, and places. More likely you’ll be asked about authors and arguments.
What I find helpful about the OPI analogy is this: you’re not expected to be able to answer everything. Not all questions are for answering. Some are to make you think. Knowing this makes a huge difference in how you react.
The other piece of advice I got, which I fear is also true, is that the comprehensive oral examination is academic hazing.
In my case…the committee decided before I even entered the room that I had passed the exam and spent the next ninety minutes putting me through the wringer mainly to get me to think about the things I hadn’t addressed fully in the written portion, so that I could be aware of them as I moved into the dissertation phase.
Why they couldn’t just tell me this I don’t know. There is an element of “we went through it, so you will also go through it” to all of this.
The Bottom Line
If you’ve done well in your reading for the exams, if you feel like you’ve done competently on the written essays (no one feels like they aced them, except for that one friend of mine who will message me the moment he reads this to tell me that he did … I see you, CMB), you should be well prepared for the orals.
If, on the other hand, you just skipped an entire section of your reading list because you found the material boring and uninteresting, then you probably have reason to be worried.
I know people who feel the need to “cram” for their orals. If this makes you feel better prepared, I won’t discourage it, but by all means don’t pull an all-nighter. You’ve had a year (or longer). You’re not going to shovel it into your brain at the last second. Re-read your written essays and get some sleep.
You’ve made it this far. It’s in no one’s interest to see you fail now!
Congratulations again! You’ve finished your coursework, and now it’s time to start the process of reading for your comps or quals (whichever term your university uses).
Different universities have different models for the written portion of the exam, but they all start pretty much the same way: read every book written in your field in a given amount of time (usually it’s about a year). What could possibly go wrong?
Know your purpose
This is actually key to the entire process and, in my entirely scientifically invalid study of random colleagues who went through it, appears to be somewhat rare.
When I was getting started, my advisor sat me down in his office and asked me: what do you want to get out of comps?
What do I want to get out of comps? Is this a trick question?
It’s a benchmark.
It’s a necessary box to be checked on the way to the finish line.
… I don’t know?
And herein lies the problem. What are you doing? Why are you reading all of these books? How do you select the subfields for which you are reading (in some disciplines, these are set; in others you have some leeway)?
So, let me walk through a couple of answers here. There’s no right or wrong, but take some time to consider what’s going on here.
You’re doing it as advance research for your dissertation. You want to get a good lay of the land and figure out where the lacunae (gaps) in research are so that you know where to start looking when you have to produce An Original Piece of Research That Hasn’t Been Done Before. (It seems weighty enough to merit capital letters). Bear in mind, you’re just doing broad background sweeps here – you’ll almost certainly wind up doing more after you’ve done your research, and this is perfectly normal.
.
You’re doing it as preparation for your teaching career. This is what I was going for, myself. And here’s why: I’m a Middle East historian (don’t let all the hypotheticals about the French Revolution fool you). Unless an institution has a large enough history program to have both the Medieval Middle East Guy or Gal (who does Rise of Islam to the Ottomans) and the Modern Middle East Guy or Gal (who does Ottomans to Why They Hate Us), the same person usually winds up teaching both sets of classes.
.
Well, as a Modern Middle East historian (which I came to kicking and screaming because I wanted to be a medievalist), my advisor suggested that I do certain subfields, but I insisted that one of them had to be the earlier period because I would probably need to demonstrate that it was a field I could teach. (And, in fact, I have taught it since. And actually enjoy teaching the medieval period more than teaching the modern stuff, mainly because I have grown tired of trying to explain that there’s more than one perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to students who are ardently opposed to the idea).
The reason why it’s important to know why you’re doing comps is that for most of us, coming straight out of coursework, comps reading is bewildering because we’re no longer accountable to anyone. We lose touch with our peers and we drift. And suddenly all that nagging doubt about whether we’re doing it right, and whether we deserve to be here, comes rushing in.
Having a sense of purpose keeps you focused when you’ve read the 50th book on the same topic and are trying to remember how and why you’re doing all of this.
Yes, I’m back to reading. This isn’t about the mechanics of reading (for which, see here), or about the logistics of it (for which, see here), so much as dealing with the sheer volume of books you’re expected to read and not losing sight of the prize.
There are many, many ways you can organize yourself and approach this, and I will say first and foremost that this is what worked for me. The most important aspect of this step in the process is that you find a system that works for you and feels natural, not that you mirror someone else’s process (especially if it doesn’t feel natural to you).
I divided my reading lists into subsections: History of the Ottoman Empire, History of the Ottoman Arab Provinces, Ottoman Society, etc. And then I read through each section in chronological order by date of publication, starting with the oldest.
I took notes on each book (this, for me, was the hardest part).
I set up a notebook in Microsoft OneNote.
(Note: My university has a massive user license for Microsoft Office, with which OneNote comes free. Other people I know have used Evernote, Google Docs, and I know a couple of people who swear by Excel or Google Sheets. I even know a couple of people who did it all in a moleskin notebook with a fancy pen because they liked the feel of writing on paper. There is no wrong answer. Come up with a system that works for you, based on your own knowledge and comfort level. You want to be able to do this easily and not fight with the tech trying to get it to do what you want every time you use it.)
Each of my three big lists had its own notebook, each subsection had its own tab, each title its own page.
My initial notetaking system was based on Sam Grace’s–as I’ve encouraged you to do, once I got more comfortable with what I wanted, I added and removed sections of her rubric and came up with mine.
My final list looked something like this:
Thesis and subarguments
Intellectual genealogy (I’ll explain this in a second)
Notes on the text
Relationship to my research
Questions
Thesis and subarguments: What is the big picture argument that the author is putting forward? What arguments does the author put forward to advance them (these are usually, but not always, addressed in individual chapters).
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Intellectual genealogy: In short, what scholars work is this author expanding upon?Who did he or she study with? Who is he or she writing against? Part of your comps is understanding the way the field in which you’re working has developed, and what the major points of debate within it are.
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A quick illustration on how this works. As an undergrad I was assigned an essay called “An Agenda for Ottoman History” by Huri İslamoğlu-İnan and Çağlar Keyder. I read it. It was … okay? I guess? The professor didn’t really explain why the article was significant. I only got that she really liked this Huri İslamoğlu person, and really didn’t like Bernard Lewis or Stanford Shaw, but I didn’t really understand why.
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As a graduate student I was introduced to the work of the Annales school of Fernand Braudel, who saw the world as a series of interconnected regions. He was one of the first historians to work against the classical model of history, which saw European greatness as the pinnacle of historical development. Another scholar, Immanuel Wallerstein, developed the notion of a world-economy, which took this notion and developed an economic model explaining how economies work across national borders and are all interrelated (I am simplifying greatly here, don’t @ me).
.
So, in our little Ottoman-history family tree: İslamoğlu was Wallerstein’s student at Cornell, and reframed our traditional understanding of Ottoman history–which was typified by scholars like Stanford Shaw and Bernard Lewis–along the lines proposed by Wallerstein, specifically writing against the traditional argument that the Ottoman Empire entered a decline after the year 1600 from which it never really recovered. Hence, we can draw kind of a family tree. Braudel begets Wallerstein, who begets İslamoğlu. On the other side, we have Shaw, Lewis, and their intellectual heirs. Each side rejects the other. (If anyone is actually interested in this, I wrote a seminar paper about it, which you can find here). .
Now, remember that when one scholar rejects another work, this is just as important as when one scholar builds on another’s work–because that’s what they’re, in fact, doing. Rejection isn’t the same as outright dismissal: rejection is a form of reaction. You’ll need to understand the rationale for it, and what form it takes in each instance. .
Understanding the intellectual genealogy will help you understand where a scholar’s ideas are coming from, and also help you more readily identify a scholar who does something unexpected or revisionist in line of the intellectual tradition he or she is coming from.
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Notes on the text: Pretty straightforward, I think. These are mostly for you – what did you learn that you didn’t know before?
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Relationship to your own research: Is this book important? Is it something you’ll want to come back to? Does the author identify the area you want to work on as one in need of further research? Do they ask unanswered questions that you want to answer?
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Questions: These are for questions you have after reading the book. Does the author pose questions they don’t answer? Does the book not satisfactorily answer questions you have? Are you confused about something?
As you work through each subsection, you’ll discover that the time you need to read subsequent books becomes shorter and shorter–this is why I recommend reading them in the order in which they were written. When you get to very new research, you may find that you don’t even really need more than a few minutes with the book because you’ve become so familiar with the subfield that you know most of the facts, and know exactly where to place the author’s argument.
You’ll also want to remember what it’s like to start a new subsection, because you may get startled when you start a new one, instead of being able to zip through one book in an hour, you’ll suddenly need a day and a half. This is going to happen, but it’s a bit jarring each time!
Your comps year is likely to be your first academic experience being almost entirely independent, and it can be extremely overwhelming. You go from meeting in seminar regularly with other groups of people who are all reading the same thing to having your advisor and committee members saying “come see me when you have something to talk about.”
If you’re not meeting regularly with your advisor (and I find this tends to be one of two extremes: either you see your advisor when you’re done reading and think you’re ready for the exam, or they insist on meeting quite regularly), consider forming a reading group.
I did this with a couple of colleagues, and just being accountable to someone made a huge different in lighting a fire under my butt to keep working. We met weekly just to talk about what we’d read that week and be supportive. We weren’t even reading the same material. It just helped to be able to articulate things out loud to someone other than my chemical engineer husband and the cats.
Be sure to keep checked in with someone. Formulate ways to keep yourself accountable to yourself and others. And keep yourself grounded. You don’t need to read 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. As I said in my previous post, know your limits. Know how much you can read before you can’t take it any more.
**
This post has, again, gone on longer than I expected. What other questions do you have about comps/quals? Let me know in the comments!
A couple of reader-submitted questions and observations about previous posts in the Grad School Survival Guide.
Can you really read a book in 2 hours?
I can! And so can you!
However, what I may have missed in my last two posts is that you won’t always want to.
The book may be interesting to you, or useful for your research.You may need to write a review of it, or lead the seminar discussion this week.
My point is that, up til now, how long it takes to read something is a function of font size, length, and your interest level. I want to encourage you to see it as something you have some control over.
If you’re pressed for time or need to prioritize your life/work balance this week, you can still extract a good amount of material and arrive in seminar prepared to participate in a relatively short time.
But, certainly, by all means: if you want to spend more time with a book, go for it!
I regret nothing.
What about Footnotes?
Ahhh, the tricky business of footnotes.
I love footnotes. If the author is going to be shady (and I love me some shade), it’s probably going to be in the footnotes.
Footnotes can offer a wealth of information that’s esoteric and tangential. When I consulted colleagues about this question most of them told me that, if it’s worth mentioning, it should be in the text and not in the notes. Absolutely true.
If you’re reading a monograph for a seminar that isn’t in one of your core areas, you can probably skip over them safely, especially if you’re pressed for time. The one caveat I would offer is to just give a quick skim if this is where the author describes his/her sources (esp. if they’re relying entirely on material that was translated for them and not the original. In some fields this isn’t a big deal, in others it’s quite controversial)
If it’s in your field, and/or you’re doing comps reading or dissertation research, you’ll want to read them. There’s a wealth of information about sources, intellectual genealogies, etc.
(Note: I went through a humanities program, and most of my advice in this and future posts in the Grad School Survival Guide is aimed toward humanities/social science programs. Hard sciences and advanced degrees in fields like law and medicine have their own skill sets, although you’ll still probably find what I say here somewhat useful.)
You’re probably looking at the title of this post and thinking, “I learned to read in the first grade, dummy.” Of course you did. (Or didn’t. I assume if you’re reading this you’ve mastered the skill at some point.)
When you arrive in the humanities or social science graduate program of your choice, however, you may find yourself in the following situation. Maybe it’ll be the second seminar. Maybe it’ll be the fifth. But you may find yourself realizing that other people in your seminar seem to have an awful lot to say about the readings for this week…and you don’t.
Why don’t I have anything to say? You will ask yourself. Is there something wrong with me?
The answer to the second question is probably best left to the medical or mental health professional most familiar with your specific case. The answer to the first, however, is much easier to address: it’s because when you arrive in a graduate seminar, the professor expects you to know how to read academic books and articles, but most graduate programs offer little to no guidance on how to do this.
This will especially be the case if you’ve entered a graduate program in a different discipline than your undergraduate degree. In my case, I did my undergrad in International Relations, my master’s in Middle Eastern Studies (an interdisciplinary program), and my doctorate in History. I was always playing catch up.
How You Learned to Read and Why It’s Wrong
Most of us learned to read for class in grade school, using dry, corporately produced, written-by-committee textbooks that make people think they hate history because it’s presented as a list of one fact after the other, to be duly memorized, spit out at exam time, and then forgotten.
A lot of us employ the same skill as undergraduates. When assigned chapters from a book, we search for names, dates, events–tangibles we can get hold of and cling on to–and ignore the dry stuff. If we asked ourselves the question of what was important about the reading, we usually meant some variant of “what is important to know for the exam?”
Much of the time, our undergraduate classes consisted of lectures in which the professor echoed the material presented in the books, and often by the end of the semester we had stopped reading because the material was redundant and the professor was more interesting and had the added advantage of knowing what was going to be on the final.
In graduate programs in humanities and the social sciences, however, most classes consist of smallish groups that engage in discussion for the whole of each session (If you’re in the UK, substitute “module” for what I call a “class”). Professors lead discussion, but they don’t lecture. They expect you to show up with something to say about the readings. It’s bewildering at first, because you’ll feel like you’re constantly unprepared. And you may find yourself staring at a page of text trying to will yourself to have an opinion about it.
For me, the moment of realization came in a graduate seminar taught by a Name Professor housed in the department of anthropology. Every week, this seminar met and his doctoral students–a doting, adoring (nay, sycophantic) bunch–would dominate discussion. Their commentary was completely unintelligible to us lowly Master’s students, and they seemed to be engaging in some sort of unspoken competition to invoke the most obscure French poststructuralist.
[For the record, twenty-five years, two graduate degrees, and eight years of teaching later, I am more than ever convinced that this is exactly what they were doing.]
I would stare at the material and think, Why am I not seeing this? Why don’t I have anything to say?
If this is causing deja-vu, Fear not, I have suggestions.
How to Learn to Read–Again
Unless you’re in a graduate program–or were lucky enough to be in an undergraduate program–in which someone takes the time to explain to you how to read an academic monograph or an article out of an academic journal (and these are, sadly, few and far between) you’re probably approaching the material in the exact same way you approached a textbook.
Herein lies the issue.
Stop seeing the material as a series of facts to be memorized, written by an infallible author, and start seeing it like an academic (which you are): an argument-driven thesis written by a scholar whose work may not be perfect.
Academic monographs are an argument presented by their author. This is why they’re not that lovely, flowing, easy to follow narrative employed in a textbook.
The entire text has an argument. It’s set out to prove something (and bear in mind that what the author wants to prove may be a how or why rather than a what or when). Each chapter has an argument that is meant to support the overall argument of the book in some fashion.
The argument will have nuance. You’re not going to read an article or monograph that argues that the French Revolution happened in France in 1789. You may read an article or monograph stating that the French Revolution happened, in part, because of a meeting that happened in Switzerland six years earlier (I am, for the record, not a French historian and am completely making these examples up). Or that the French Revolution happened in 1789 because there was a period of warm weather that caused crops to fail in Bordeaux the previous summer, and we just figured this out based on atmospheric data.
So, if you find yourself feeling left behind in class discussion, or like each class meeting is like dropping into the middle of a conversation that started without you (and believe you me, I felt this a lot), it most likely boils down to this: your classmates are treating the book as an argument that can be critiqued, while you’re viewing it as a set of facts to be taken at face value.
My classmates in the anthropology seminar were using theorists to suggest that, if one looked at the argument from a different perspective, one could deconstruct and reconstruct the author’s argument in radically different ways. (This does not change my conclusion they were trying to one-up each other in naming obscure theorists, though).
Where do I find the argument?
Well, funny enough, it’s probably been staring you in the face all along.
Monographs and articles are structured in much the same way–at some point, you’ll be instructed on how to construct your writing this way, too.
Start with the introduction. These are wildly inconsistent–sometimes the introduction is called “Introduction,” sometimes it’s called “Chapter 1.” (It’s never the acknowledgements and usually not called Preface.)
They usually begin with a hook to get you into the story. An anecdote, something to illustrate why what is being discussed is important. (They don’t always–some of us [embarrassed cough] employ this technique heavily, others just jump right in.)
Then you’ll get into an arc that will present the basic issue, usually explaining how it’s traditionally been seen in the field.
Then there will be a literature review. You’ll know this section because of all the footnotes or inline citations. (Pro-tip: if you found this book or article because you’re writing a research paper, this is the section to mine if you’re looking for tips on who else has written about this topic). This is the second most important section of the introduction.
Then you’ll see a line that says something like “[Title of monograph] argues that” or “I posit that” or “The thesis of this book is that …” Here’s your argument. Star it. Underline it. This is, for the author, and for you, the person who has to discuss what the author has done, the most important sentence in the entire book. (Note: in an article this declaration may come before the literature review.)
After presenting the argument, the author will lay out their strategy–and the way they will do this is by outlining the book for you. In Chapter 1, I will describe A and demonstrate B. Chapter 2 continues this by describing how B then led to C. And so on.
In other words, it’s the section you’re often tempted to skip right over because you’re going to read the book, and are tempted to skip over because you’re asking yourself why you would read an outline of the book that you’re about to read. Don’t! It’s key to understanding what the book is trying to accomplish.
Now that you know what the author’s argument is, you can explore why it matters.
Back up and look at the literature review. (In history books the literature review tends to come before the author’s presentation of their argument, but this isn’t set in stone. It may come afterward).
The literature review is meant to answer one basic question: how has the issue that the author is presenting been described by other scholars who’ve approached the same or similar issues?
Your task as a reader is to answer two basic questions:
How is what the author is doing revisionist? (read: new and different. In the field of history, revisionist can be a bit of a loaded term.)
How have other authors written about this topic before?
If you can answer these two questions, 75% of your work is done.
The rest of what you need to address in your reading of the material consists of:
3. Does the author’s argument make sense?
4. Is the author’s argument convincing? (This is similar to, but not the same as, the previous question. It is perfectly possible for someone to put forward a sensical argument and then do a poor job of backing it up. This is, in fact, a good place to start your evaluation of the text.)
You’ll notice I haven’t asked you if you can remember what happened on November 10, 1789. And your professor probably won’t, either. Remember, it’s not that kind of class.
Okay, I did that, but I still don’t have much to say …
If you’re still a little lost, or have done all of this but aren’t sure how to move from “Okay, I understand the author’s argument, but I still don’t have much to say about it,” don’t be afraid to look at book reviews of the title you’re reading (this is harder with journal articles, but not impossible. Check out Google Scholar and search by both title and author).
This is especially important to do if you notice that the author takes particular issue with another scholar’s work–see if that scholar responded or had something to say about your author’s critique. Obviously if one of the two was dead when the other was published, this won’t work as well.
Reviews also give you some insight as to where to start looking if you’re not sure how to go about critiquing. Your first semester in, you probably aren’t married to a particular theory, school of thought, or have a favorite theorist–and that’s perfectly fine (I still don’t).
Even if you found the argument and have answered questions 1 and 2, you may still be a little unclear as to how to go about answering questions 3 and 4.
First off: It’s okay! You’re still learning. A good graduate seminar will pull in a lot of books from different perspectives, and it’s totally understandable that you won’t be well-versed in all those fields.
You should, however, be able to follow what’s going on when classmates offer critiques or comments better than you were before. The more you practice this kind of reading, the better prepared you’ll be. And after a few weeks, you’ll be able to jump into the discussion yourself.
Christopher S Rose 