Guidelines for Reading & Note Taking

Most syllabi have an enormous amount of readings on them; and most papers or exam answers are expected to be quite comprehensive.  This creates two problems:  (1) In all likelihood, you will not be able to read all assigned readings (nor all readings you'd like to do for yourself) carefully from the first word to the last.  (2) By the time you write your papers or exams, chances are, you won't remember half of the things you read.  Consequently, you will probably either have to read selectively or skim at least parts or both; and you'll need some system of keeping track of what each reading is about.  The following eight questions--to be asked of/about each reading--are intended to facilitate that process.  Before you put away a reading you should probably have gotten far enough to answer, at a bare minimum, questions 1-3 and 6 below.  That way, you'll at least know whether or not to return to a given piece for a more careful reading later if you wanted to work on a particular issue.  Ideally, you should also step back and think critically about each piece, so as to be able to come up with your own answers to questions 4, 5, 7, and 8, too.

Two disclaimers:  (i) The questions below define a core rather than a limit:  You may of course find it useful to keep track of other aspects of the readings, such as the author's epistemological position, the ideological tradition s/he writing in, the literatures to which the piece is relevant, etc.  (ii) The standard format for articles and books in the empirical social sciences, especially in American academia, is to present a theoretical argument followed by some kind of empirical support for that argument (ranging from a simple plausibility probe to elaborate case studies or quantitative analyses).  Not all articles and books follow this format.  Most do--but not all.  For those that don't, these guidelines may not be appropriate.

(1) What is this piece about?
What is the topic?  What its explanadum (or "dependent variable," if you want)?

(2) What is the argument?

(3) What is the logic of the argument?
What are the assumptions?  How do they lead the author to her/his hypotheses regarding the explanandum?  What's "doing the explaining" and how?

NOTE:  Be sure not to set up a straw man or simply to quote the author.  Instead, restate the argument in your own words and try to be as precise as possible about the deductive logic, keeping in mind Lakatos' injunction that "the first stage of any serious criticism of a scientific theory is to reconstruct, improve its logical deductive articulation" (1970:128, emphasis added).  Doing so carefully will also help you identify inconsistencies, logical gaps, omissions, etc. by the author, thus leading almost automatically to the next two steps:

(4) What's wrong with the argument?

(5) How could it be improved?

NOTE:  It is this stage (questions 3-5) that merits the most work/intellectual energy.  As Lakatos reminds us, moving from theory to empirical "assessment" is tricky (not least because theorizing, particularly at the early stages of researching a particular issue, involves abstraction via ideal types that, by definition, are not matched by anything we find in the "real world").  Hence, don't rush to the empirics (as a number of midterm essays did).  While we want our theories to give us insights into the real world, evaluating the theory qua theory (i.e. the consistency of its assumptions, its deductive logic, etc.) should precede an evaluation of the claims the author makes about empirical support for her/his theory:  If the theory itself is flawed, how could any empirics support it?

That said, while you should always keep in mind the possibility that the argument may be fundamentally flawed, do not prematurely dismiss it as "stupid," particularly if you dislike the author's approach or argument.  Chances are, the author is, like you, a very intelligent person genuinely interested in the question without being unduly wedded to his/her answer.  Give the argument the most sympathetic reading--in response to (3) above--thenbe as precise and incisive with your criticism as you can be, criticism that should be both destructive and constructive.

Then ask:

(6) What empirical support does the author offer for his argument?
What kind of empirical data does s/he use (narrative case study/studies; basic correlations; time series regression; etc.)?  What are the specific cases/data s/he uses?

(7) Is it convincing?  Does it indeed support the argument?

Finally, insofar as you criticize the author's empirical "test" of the argument (or maybe the lack of even a plausibility probe), spend a moment to think about:

(8) How might one evaluate the argument (and counterarguments) better than the author has done?

You may well find yourself coming back to such notes for a seminar paper:  Your theoretical critique (especially its constructive part) and sketch of how to research it empirically in essence are a draft research proposal ...

Happy reading!