Reading Tips

Paul Edwards has a downloadable resource Links to an external site. about how to read a book. Many of the strategies he shares are useful for reading articles as well.

 

I mentioned Mathew Wolf-Meyer’s advice for how to analyze models of articles. It's meant to help people prepare their own articles, but I think it is useful to think about the different components of a text. His original article is here. ( Links to an external site.you'll also find on his website other helpful advice on graduate school, writing, and professionalization in anthropology).

A summary of his writing strategy:

Using four colors:

• Highlight all of the primary evidence: actual empirical content generated by the author’s research. Descriptions of spaces, people and events, quotes from interviews and other qualitative and quantitative data.
• Highlight all of the secondary evidence w focus on content outside of the literature review: paraphrasing other authors, as well as historical or other anthropological work on the same topic. This does not include theoretical citations.
• Highlight all of the argumentative content —thesis, topic sentences, claims being made, theoretical citations, especially if the author’s purpose is to argue with a set of theories or theorists.
• Highlight all of citations in the literature review section of the paper. 1-2 pages where the author is positioning the research alongside other work in the same subfield, same topic, on the topic and subfield in the same geographic region.

 

If you have other tips or resources, please send them to me and I will post them here!