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Hello, this is Ha from Academic Skills.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to turn your reading into writing.
At university academic tasks are set to help you get familiar with
and become a member of an academic discipline.
This requires good reading and writing skills.
Reading is crucial for exploring disciplinary knowledge in breadth and
depth. While writing helps shape your understanding and application of
this knowledge in formulating your own ideas.
Reading and writing often go hand in hand in academic studies and
transform into each other.
When you address assessment tasks.
When you start on an assignment, you're likely to already know something
about the topic. This knowledge might have come from lectures and tutorials
you've attended, readings you've done, notes you've taken in the subject
as well as from the world of work, home or social life.
Use all these pre-assessment knowledge and resources to help you get in the zone.
When preparing for your assignment, prior readings and notes
make the assignment less daunting and more doable as you're not starting from scratch
because this is important to start reading and writing notes from day
one of your study.
When reading and writing specifically for an assignment.
Be very clear about what you are required to do and what the task involves.
Task analysis makes your reading and writing more purposeful and effective.
Focus on your purpose when you select relevant sources.
Read and take notes on the assignment topic.
Try to read and interact with the text on different levels and in different
ways to really understand it.
You can begin with a quick preview of the title, abstract, introduction,
conclusion and any headings to develop an overview of what the text
is about, whether it's relevant to your assignment and how you will
need to read it.
Sometimes you may decide that you only need to skim through a text for
the main idea, or scan it for a particular detail.
Other times you may want to read a text more closely and connect
it to your own experience as well as summarizing and critiquing
it. This all depends on your reading purpose.
It's important that you take notes while reading.
Doing this will reduce the need to go over the same text again,
save you time and give you input for your writing.
Notes should be taken in your own words instead of being copied from the source.
If you use your own words to summarise or paraphrase the author's ideas,
you can avoid plagiarism and achieve a stronger voice and consistency
in your writing. Using your own words, you can note down what
you find novel or interesting about the text.
In a research paper, you might want to note down the paper's aim, methods,
findings and implications.
You should also ask critical questions
while you are reading such as, why am I reading this?
Or what is my purpose?
What is the author's position?
What evidence do they use to support this?
What makes this claim convincing or not?
And what use can I make of this?
This is an example of how reading is turned into writing in response
to the question, what are the factors associated with employee
productivity.
Here the reader previewed and evaluated these texts as being highly
relevant to this topic.
They both talk about the role of a work environment that supports employees
health and well-being.
These are the notes taken while reading the articles.
Notice how these notes have been organized to support the main idea,
which is an enabling factor for employee productivity, is a work
environment that supports employees physical and mental health.
This idea forms part of the assignment plan
in this example. Notice that the notes are not full sentences,
but just ideas jotted down.
Pause the video to take a closer look.
Notice how these notes briefly summarise each study's purpose.
Key methods.
Findings and implications.
These notes were later turned into this paragraph.
Pause the video, read the paragraph, and go back to the previous slides,
if necessary, to find the connection between the articles, the
notes and the writing.
This example is not perfect, but it demonstrates the transformation
of reading and note-taking into writing.
Notice how the notes from one reading were used in this writing.
And then the other reading.
Also, notice how the articles are linked together.
And how they are used to support the writer's main idea, which
is stated in the topic sentence and reinforced in the concluding
sentence of the paragraph.
This example shows that to write well, you need to read and take notes
with a clear purpose and develop the ability to infer
and condense the main idea and evidence of the reading.
These skills take a lot of practice to build, but you can start now with your
next assignment. Enjoy your reading and writing.
For more tips and resources, search for Academic Skills.
Unimelb.
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