LibGuides: Social work, Social care and Community Studies: How to engage with your reading

How to be an effective reader and engage with the literature

Before we begin finding journal articles, let's think about how we read for academic study.

Reading is a lifelong skill and we read all the time... whether its reading for fun or for specific purpose like reading furniture assembly instructions.

Remember, we are reading with a purpose to help answer your assignment question.
We can be selective and read only the information we need! We do not have to read the textbook from page 1 to the end of the book - only the relevant sections we need!
Be active... make notes to help consolidate your understanding.

Here are a few useful guides for you to take a look about effective reading to help you get the most from your reading:

Effective Reading Our top tips and advice on getting the most from your reading, taking effective notes from journal article and identifying links between sources.
This is a guide created by the Skills Team at Hallam Library.
Greenhalgh, & Taylor, R. (1997). How to Read a Paper: Papers That Go beyond Numbers (Qualitative Research). BMJ (Online), 315(7110), 740–743. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.315.7110.740
This is a journal article from the British Medical Journal.
How To Read an Academic Paper
This is a video is produced by UBC iSchool.

Be active and critical

Here are some tips and strategies on how to get more from your reading.

Learn how to identify the purpose of your reading, the correct approach to take, and adopt new techniques such as skimming and scanning.

Reading and Notemaking tutorials

You will encounter a great deal of information during your studies. Much of this will come to you through lectures, reading, discussion and research. These tutorials cover strategies for:

reading effectively
making notes while reading
making notes in lectures

Reading more deeply

The materials above have been provided by the Skills Centre at Sheffield Hallam University.

The Skills Centre runs sessions on both campuses covering all sorts of topics, from improving your writing to stats help. You can find out more out about the Skills Centre here.

Strategies for Supporting Academic Reading: what do other students say!

Lets think about how to work with the information you find and then need to read.

Spend the next 4 minutes listening to these top tips from our final year students. We are all unique and learn in a variety of different ways and use different strategies for reading and working with information.

The Strategies for Supporting Academic Reading video allows you to consider which practice will work best for you and you may find a new approach that you want to try.