At Level 6, you will read a wide range of texts and sources of information. This is brilliant for furthering your understanding, increasing your knowledge, and helping you explore ideas and topics.
You'll also read to gather differing perspectives and viewpoints.
Reading will form a key part of your academic process, and you'll use the wide range of literature to help you in your assignments by:
Your reading list can support you with finding sources, as can the Academic Librarian team (see the glossary).
Do you know where and how to find academic texts?
You can get support with searching for academic literature and search techniques from the Academic Librarians (see the glossary).
How will you choose which sources are relevant? How will you know whether a source is 'good' or not? It's important to consider which sources you use, and to evaluate them. There is support on the Skills Hub for helping you to evaluate sources. Here's one of the resources: evaluating sources
Are there things you do to support your reading?
Devise your 'dream reading situation' - where are you, have you got snacks, is there background noise or silence? Are you reading on screen or on paper? Think about why you like those conditions.
It might not always be possible to read in your perfect reading conditions. Think of ways you can modify the conditions to help. For example, if you like a quiet space to read, but you are stuck in a noisy environment, can you put headphones on (without anything playing through them)? If you prefer reading on paper but need to read on screen, can you change font size to look more like a book? Can you access the text on a different device that feels more like a book?
As you will be reading widely, it's really helpful to be organised about keeping track of what you've read. Even before you start your course, you could create a reading log. There are lots of approaches to this, but consider what information would be useful to keep track of, and devise a structure to record those details. If you were to create a table to keep a log, what columns would you want? What information will be useful to come back to?
- Start by reading the introduction/abstract, and then conclusion, of a source, to get an overall idea. Reading these will give you a summary of the piece of writing, and put you in the picture for a more detailed read.
- If you come across new words when reading on a topic, create a glossary of them. This will mean you don’t have to keep looking it up, and you can feel more confident with the terminology.
- Create and keep some form of reading log to keep track of the things you read, and to make it easier to review, revisit or find them again.