The art of reading for writing success

The quality of your writing—and your publishing success—cannot be separated from the quality of your reading.

In fact, the depth of your critical engagement with current debate and the sophistication of your argument depends on your ability to read critically. A publishable peer-reviewed journal article is part of a dialogue with other scholars and texts. Your journal article contributes to this dialogue by both listening to what others’ say—the papers you read and cite—and building on this with a reply that takes the discussion further.

Given the volume of papers that you want to read, and the amount of time that you actually have available, it is also necessary to read efficiently.

In short, the demands of scholarly writing and publishing mean that you need to read critically and purposefully.

Such reading, as we all know, is far from easy and does not come naturally. It is often hard work. Doing it well requires self-reflection and conscious practice.

How to read journal articles: key tips and short clips

Arising out of my own scholarly reading practice (years of trial and error!) I offer six key tips:

1. Always read with purpose. Know why you are reading a given article or book. To start with, write down your main reason as a way to keep it in the forefront of your mind as you read. E.g. ‘I am reading this paper to better understand how theory x is used to frame empirical data analysis to support my approach in my draft article’.


2. Read ACTIVELY. Having a clear purpose will help you stay focussed, not least by helping you identify critical questions to ask of the text. E.g. ‘are explicit connections made between the theory and the data collection?’ ‘How and where does the theory allow insights into the data?’ ‘Could these insights be derived without reference to this theory?’ And so on.


3. Read when you are most alert. That is, try not to think of reading as something you do when you are tired and want to lie on the couch.


4. Put down the highlighter. While useful in some contexts, the highlighter is most often a means to defer thinking and translation of the relevant sections into your own knowledge and writing. Try to read at your desk so that you can be writing at the same time.


5. Expect to read key papers several times, and to come away with a slightly different and hopefully richer understanding each time.


6. If you are finding a text hard to read—a common and ongoing experience—try to read the piece the whole way through without stopping. This will give you a sense of the overall argument and structure. This helps your subsequent readings when you can take difficult sections and pay close attention including trying to map the argument in your notes.

I have created a set of 11 short videos covering these and other important aspects of reading journal articles and how this relates to producing quality scholarship. These videos demonstrate how I seek to read purposefully and critically. In addition to providing strategies and tips these clips include insights from postgraduate students. You can see the full set at the following link.

Feel free to watch them sequentially or dip into topics of particular interest. For example as you work on your journal article drafts, in the video below I discuss that you need to keep in mind how reading is part of your engagement with other scholars.

How, in practice, reading can best be incorporated as part of your writing activity.

Why it's important to hone your critical approach.

And finally—most importantly— how to keep focus by having a defined purpose before you begin to read.

Reading to improve style

Of course, reading can also help you to improve your writing style(s). Sadly, this does not happen entirely through subconscious transference. Here too, read actively and with this clear purpose in mind. Reading with explicit attention to how other scholars introduce the framing literature, how they incorporate empirical data, and how they develop an argument, for example, will help you see how to do this in your own work.

A few quick tips

1. Take a paragraph that you like from someone else’s work and go through it line by line to understand the structure.


2. Skim a selection of recent articles from the journal in which you hope to publish your own work. Do this to understand the conventions and expectations of the selected journal. Look, for example, for patterns in structure, the level of detail given in method sections, the use of first or third person.

Similarly, paying deliberate attention to turns of phrase, vocabulary, and sentence structure in the work of others will give you insights and ideas you can apply to your work. Identifying things that you don’t like in others’ writing—and being clear about why you don’t like particular approaches—can help you sharpen your prose.

Ultimately, reading for style allows you to develop what I like to think of as ‘metavision’: that is, the ability to see how writing is structured and how the many details work together to support a convincing and readable journal article (for example).

The big payoff is when you can use this skill for reading and editing your own writing.

Reading as political and creative act

You cannot read everything, and so you must be selective. It is easy however to become overly pragmatic. This can be a problem because scholarly writing is a creative process for which reading provides inspiration. It is important, and exciting, to read widely and sometimes, at least, beyond your disciplinary boundaries.

I also recommend reading outside your cultural comfort zone. By doing this you gain a sense of the cultural underpinnings of your own research; that is, you gain ‘outsider’ insights into the politics of your worldview (eg. see https://culturalpolitics.net/). Try to read works not just from the West for example, not just those written from dominant vantage points (.ie. that of white, heterosexual, male researchers), and not just works using the ‘traditional’ methodologies in your discipline/s.

In this way, reading remains a feast that sustains interesting research and writing. Part of this feast is talking with others about their reading practice. Talk about your reading: how you manage it, what excites you, how you feel about what you read.