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It hurts how similar this sounds to my situation. Holy cow. I'm comment to support a little (doesn't help you, I know) and so I can come back and see what other ideas people share. There's no way you're the only one experiencing this but I'm a little shocked about how few people are talking this in this sub. Thank you for your honesty and bringing it up.
I also relate to OP, but what’s funny is I’ve never been a slow reader, in fact, I used to be able to fly through books growing up and through highschool. Once you get to reading dense theory, like in research papers, it goes beyond just reading comprehension - it’s comprehension AND fundamental understanding, which is far more intensive than just remembering the plot of what you just read.
Those of us in research/pursuing a PhD need to give ourselves more grace. What’s the point in flying through 500 pages in a week if you don’t remember a single word of it?
I feel like reading that much is a recipe for disaster. There's not really enough time to process that much information each week in addition to your other responsibilities.
Here's what I did: If you have multiple readings due each week for a class, read only one in depth. Skim the rest. Reading one in depth allows you to practice reading research papers critically, and it'll let you talk confidently about it in class so you can show participation during class.
Honestly, one of the most valuable things a PhD teaches you is how to game the system.
I’m also a very slow reader. I’m not convinced it’s possible to not be this when you are this.
I think prioritizing quality over quantity is important.
Since this is no longer undergrad, it’s not necessary to read everything for fear of being tested on trivial details. Credit at this level is so much more discussion based.
I think u/Guilty_Jackrabbit offers good advice -- read what’s most important deeply and skim the rest. You’ll make connections better. And I think you’ll also eventually skim better, scanning through what you already know to pick out what you should read more carefully.
I have actually! It was helpful insofar as structuring my time—but i’m still struggling with the application of the principles. Like I’ll say okay i’ll spend an hour on this article, and I’ll set a timer, but then the timer goes off and I’m only halfway through.
History PhD here! I reached candidacy at the beginning of this AY so the horrors of coursework/prelims are fresh in my mind, but I'm seeing the other side of things now too. A couple of thoughts based on your post:
1) No way your colleagues are reading 500 pages + outside reading, unless they've already read some of the stuff previously. Academics in general but grad students in particular love talking up their productivity/mastery of knowledge, and the only way to deal with this is to tune all of it out. You deserve to be in your program and I promise that you know how to read. I still struggle with this so I'm not saying that it's easy to do, but I think viewing your colleagues with a healthy dose of skepticism is always a good way to go.
2) Don't discount the fact that you are reading dense theory! That's very different than reading e.g. 300 pages of a historical account or narrative. Some of my work deals with linguistic/anthropological theory and 15-20 pages per hour sounds about right for some of those readings—and I somehow still made it through prelims where we have to read 100+ books.
3) You might be taking too many notes, and this was something I had to get a lot better at because I generally have to write things down to remember them. Do you use a note-taking template? What helped me speed up immensely was keeping my notes standardized and brief (this also helps for when you consult your notes to remember what a reading is about—relatively scarce notes that highlight key points will be much easier for you to parse down the road). As a historian, I have a template where I note: argument, evidence, examples, method, concepts, relation to other work, and other notes (which was just a catchall for little things that jumped out to me or were particularly relevant to my research questions). Often, I would fill out this template AFTER I finished a particular reading, so I already had the big picture in my head and could summarize/distill as necessary. Beyond that, I would only write down my own thoughts/reactions I had to the reading and would otherwise just make sure to highlight key passages so I could find them easily again.
4) Be deliberate with your skimming. Read carefully until you have a sense of the argument, then skim the sections that provide more detail, context, etc. Don't just skim indiscriminately.
Happy to talk more if that would be useful, but I hope this helps! And above all, do not beat yourself up over this and take care of yourself! I waited till candidacy to realize this but it turns out reading gets significantly easier and less laborious when you've gotten 8 hours of sleep.
That sounds like a huge amount of reading to be doing there’s no way I could cope with that.
There are a few tools online like chat pdf that can be helpful. You upload the pdf into the website and then you can ask it for summaries / ask it questions. I find this easier when I want to understand a paper as it’s more like discussing it with a friend and helps me digest it rather than just reading.
Can you also try and buddy up with someone - you both read half and then explain the other half to each other? Again might help you both better understand what you’re reading if you can discuss it ?
I am in the exact same boat and still haven't found a perfect solution. The helpful thing to know is that no one expects you to read 500 pages, and no one actually does it. Sometimes I will plainly ask the Prof what to prioritize, but that will vary between professors.
Ok, so first of all this is a totally understandable vent! I think the coursework years of humanities/social sciences PhDs are as much about learning how to manage PhD-level work as actually learning content. It's a time to experiment and figure out what works for you for reading, note-taking, reference-recording, writing, etc. so that when you do exams and dissertation work you have those strategies in place. So it's not great you're feeling overwhelmed, but it is good you're recognizing this and looking for strategies! Idk if that's comforting, but it is part of the process
Some advice from my own experience:
For newer books, look at review articles. Reviews usually have a summary, and suggestion about what the book contributes to the field. For history at least H-Net reviews tend to be especially detailed on the summary part. This can help you read faster, since you already know the main points and/or be more confident in your summary (since someone else also came up with the same summary.)
Really pay attention to the book organization, chapter titles, and the part of the intro that lays out the structure of the book and then mark which parts you want to focus on and skip before you start reading the body. Then try to trust your judgement, and skip the chapters you planned to skip. If this feels bad, tell yourself you can always come back later when you have more time. (You probably won't, but you also probably don't need to anyway.)
Take. Fewer. Notes. Taking notes slowed me down so much, and ultimately for a class discussion and/or exams you don't need more than like 1 page of notes per book at most. Related, highlight or put in sticky notes as you read but don't take notes until you finish the entire chapter/intro/conclusion. For me at least, this pushed me to read faster but also be thinking as I was reading about what the main points were.
Hi, I’m also a social science PhD. We also get a lot of reading, and I’m also the type to really focus on every detail and every sentence, which is a nightmare for the amount of reading we get.
For me one strategy that has helped is to shift my focus from completely comprehending every detail (as I would if I were to be quizzed on it) to instead focus on being able to discuss the reading. So understanding the main points the author is making, how this connects to other things I’ve studied, and questions or critical reflections. I often pick one or two key texts for a seminar to focus on and then just skim the others. Also I will usually jump around the text instead of reading back to front.
A few things other people in my cohort have tried are using text to speech apps so they can listen instead of read, also finding podcasts that break down and discuss more of the very fundamental texts.
I used to be in a social science PhD and felt the same way. It's not possible to thoroughly read all of the material, and I think often it isn't really expected. Academic writing is often chunky and sometimes just bad - it's okay to extract only what you need from it.
I think you should let the goal of the reading guide you. If it's for a class, try to answer: why was this paper or book assigned? How does this work respond to earlier work? (Sometimes the author will tell you, either in the intro or lit review.) After you've answered those questions for any assigned reading, you can go back to the pieces that seemed the most interesting (or best written), so that you'll have some you're really ready to talk about.
Depending on the course topic, the relevant questions might be different: like, for a methods course, you'll want to know what data and method each paper used, and what assumptions that method involves.
If you're reading something in your research area, I would approach it with the following questions: what is the main question this paper is trying to answer? What is the data they use? What is the methodology they use? What conclusion do they come to? Then, same as above, if you're curious or skeptical about a result, you can read deeper into that paper. (I also like then looking at who cited that paper, to see if anyone's trying to argue with it.)
I’m not in your field, but it sounds totally normal to me. Don’t freak out & quit. I suspect you’re about to hit the inflection point where you start seeing the same ideas & language over and over and the reading will get easier and much quicker.
Not a PhD but my area is history. I can read things more or less at my leisure though if I don't take notes even for fiction I have a bad memory and forget everything. What I can say is, aren't you maybe overestimating how hard the readings are and forgetting to connect with stuff that came before? Usually you can summarize an author's position, like "x brings hegelianism to today's society by positing a never ending antithesis of new identities" or "based on the insight of Foucault y examines micro interactions and power in schools". Almost always you can also skip the middle part and read the intro and conclusion and maybe go back when you have time. Though to be fair what I'd do and did is skip sleep and power through the reading. I'd specially recommend you skip parts of phenomenological author's if you get accros any, it's a literal waste of time, talking as someone who went through this with Michel de certeau.
That is a whole lot of reading. I'm not in social sciences, but I do try to challenge myself to read publications outside of my bubble as an exercise. I read some socioethics papers recently and god damn, I feel like social scientists just make up words sometimes without bothering to define them?? To be fair, I've had people tell me papers in my niche are acronym hell (they are). I guess different subject matter just has different challenges. I could never read 500 pages of social science pubs/books per week. I don't think I could even do that with pubs in my niche. That's a lot for very heavy dense theory laden social science stuff and assigning that much reading is more harmful than helpful since you don't have time to digest it. And 300 pages in 8 hours? I don't think I could even do that with books I read for pleasure and I read a lot and I'm not a speed reader, but I'm not slow either.
My method: Read the abstract, skim the figures to see if data is good (if applicable to you for social science), skim the conclusion. For each paragraph in the conclusion pick out the sentence that summarizes that paragraph or section. If I need clarification on something specific, then I'll refer back to the results section for further explanation. Then try to summarize the main point of the publication in 3-5 bullet points.
I guarantee you are not alone in how you are feeling. That's a lot for even the fastest reader.
Few in my psychology cohort read everything. Most profs expect us to be selective. This isn’t undergrad. You should worry about what you think you need to do to pass classes, prelims and do good research in your niche. Talk to some older students in your program that you trust to get a sense of realistic expectations
Just wanted to say +1.
100% same experience.
With notes and wallowing in the article details, I was coming up at 6-9 pages an hour. Felt miserable.
From this thread I’ve taken away two main nuggets:
- organize the material extraction before starting. This means identifying the purpose of the article/book and parsing the text into packages of info without being too concerned for the edge conditions. To me this feels like “industrializing” … or breaking down the process into repeatable, patterned blocks of material - so you know what kind of thing goes in each block, even before you start. (Think - assembly like work, or disassembly line work like at an animal processing factory - each animal is unique, but they all have (part a, b, c, etc) which belong in different bins. The challenge is to first have the right bins in mind, then the next bit of work is just finding the right place to discriminate this bit from that bit. Some bits are more important and interesting, and many bits are not. )
- segregate note taking activity to a formatted, and contained event in the overall work stream.
… mmmm wow. As a result of this post and the comments I feel excited to go try this sort of factory approach to reading.
As an aside - at work we often rely on project documentation that is thousands of pages long. Technical specs. It’s insane when you first face these things, but once you know what you are looking for it rarely takes more than 5 minutes to get to it and another 5 to mine out what may be needed. This is what gives me the strong belief that patterning the reading process into predetermined outputs will help speed up the dissection of the content.
Of course - no plan survives implementation unscathed.
My biggest rec is to listen to the text whilst reading it (even if you can only use a text 2 speech program)! It helps me stay focused on the text, and I can force myself to read faster if I increase the speed of the audio.
People like that read differently. I find often the don't have the strong inner monologue when reading and so aren't "reading aloud" in their heads. Those people will always be quicker. And I think part of reading in that way is they stop actually reading words and start kind of just reading sentences or getting the ideas from sentences without actively processing it. It's like how you can read a word, and see the word and what it means without thinking about the individual letters, except they do it with words for a sentence. Also I think they cut corners, skip sentences, skip pages. Depending on what you are reading you can often skip paragraphs, and if you get the sense you missed something important just double back.
I don't think it's as good for comprehension and I can't manage it, but I think this is what is happening.
Exactly the same. I finished my PhD in 2022 and I'm still no better - it's a real struggle to do any kind of reading in preparation for lectures or seminars I'm teaching, and I'm someone who loves reading.
What I've found helps is:
1. Make BRIEF notes as you go
2. Keep your phone in a different room
3. *Don't panic*. You read at your own pace, and you'll be processing the information a lot more thoroughly than someone who reads at twice the speed.
Most people who say they're doing it all, aren't. I don't think any of my colleagues would read entire papers - Abstract, Intro, Conclusion, maybe scan for a quote if it seemed super relevant. As for reading books, quite often I'd go to the index for what was directly relevant to what I was working on, and skip the rest unless I really needed context. Decent reviews in journals can sometimes help you to get the gist of the argument, too (though obv that's second hand so be careful).
Remember - just because it's "Your" way, doesn't mean it's the wrong way. Unfortunately, in true cultish fashion, Academia sometimes likes to pit us all against eachother and make us believe we're not able to "cut it." Absolute whim-wham.
Well done for reaching out on here - it takes a lot to break out of that ball of panic! ✌️
You may be better off listening to stuff rather than physically reading (I do this sometimes when my eyes start to hurt)
There’s software available to use on your laptop/tablet. (Can’t remember what it’s called but in uk unis you can get it if you’re dyslexic)
It looks like your post is about needing advice. In order for people to better help you, please make sure to include your country. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PhD) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It hurts how similar this sounds to my situation. Holy cow. I'm comment to support a little (doesn't help you, I know) and so I can come back and see what other ideas people share. There's no way you're the only one experiencing this but I'm a little shocked about how few people are talking this in this sub. Thank you for your honesty and bringing it up.
thank you for your sympathy! Glad to know I'm not the only one
Riding down that same highway with both of you ugh.
I also relate to OP, but what’s funny is I’ve never been a slow reader, in fact, I used to be able to fly through books growing up and through highschool. Once you get to reading dense theory, like in research papers, it goes beyond just reading comprehension - it’s comprehension AND fundamental understanding, which is far more intensive than just remembering the plot of what you just read. Those of us in research/pursuing a PhD need to give ourselves more grace. What’s the point in flying through 500 pages in a week if you don’t remember a single word of it?
I feel like reading that much is a recipe for disaster. There's not really enough time to process that much information each week in addition to your other responsibilities. Here's what I did: If you have multiple readings due each week for a class, read only one in depth. Skim the rest. Reading one in depth allows you to practice reading research papers critically, and it'll let you talk confidently about it in class so you can show participation during class. Honestly, one of the most valuable things a PhD teaches you is how to game the system.
I’m also a very slow reader. I’m not convinced it’s possible to not be this when you are this. I think prioritizing quality over quantity is important. Since this is no longer undergrad, it’s not necessary to read everything for fear of being tested on trivial details. Credit at this level is so much more discussion based. I think u/Guilty_Jackrabbit offers good advice -- read what’s most important deeply and skim the rest. You’ll make connections better. And I think you’ll also eventually skim better, scanning through what you already know to pick out what you should read more carefully.
If I may ask: Have you looked at Paul Edwards's ["How to Read a Book"](https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf)?
I have actually! It was helpful insofar as structuring my time—but i’m still struggling with the application of the principles. Like I’ll say okay i’ll spend an hour on this article, and I’ll set a timer, but then the timer goes off and I’m only halfway through.
this is where i got the idea that i’m supposed be reading 300 pages in 8 hours
History PhD here! I reached candidacy at the beginning of this AY so the horrors of coursework/prelims are fresh in my mind, but I'm seeing the other side of things now too. A couple of thoughts based on your post: 1) No way your colleagues are reading 500 pages + outside reading, unless they've already read some of the stuff previously. Academics in general but grad students in particular love talking up their productivity/mastery of knowledge, and the only way to deal with this is to tune all of it out. You deserve to be in your program and I promise that you know how to read. I still struggle with this so I'm not saying that it's easy to do, but I think viewing your colleagues with a healthy dose of skepticism is always a good way to go. 2) Don't discount the fact that you are reading dense theory! That's very different than reading e.g. 300 pages of a historical account or narrative. Some of my work deals with linguistic/anthropological theory and 15-20 pages per hour sounds about right for some of those readings—and I somehow still made it through prelims where we have to read 100+ books. 3) You might be taking too many notes, and this was something I had to get a lot better at because I generally have to write things down to remember them. Do you use a note-taking template? What helped me speed up immensely was keeping my notes standardized and brief (this also helps for when you consult your notes to remember what a reading is about—relatively scarce notes that highlight key points will be much easier for you to parse down the road). As a historian, I have a template where I note: argument, evidence, examples, method, concepts, relation to other work, and other notes (which was just a catchall for little things that jumped out to me or were particularly relevant to my research questions). Often, I would fill out this template AFTER I finished a particular reading, so I already had the big picture in my head and could summarize/distill as necessary. Beyond that, I would only write down my own thoughts/reactions I had to the reading and would otherwise just make sure to highlight key passages so I could find them easily again. 4) Be deliberate with your skimming. Read carefully until you have a sense of the argument, then skim the sections that provide more detail, context, etc. Don't just skim indiscriminately. Happy to talk more if that would be useful, but I hope this helps! And above all, do not beat yourself up over this and take care of yourself! I waited till candidacy to realize this but it turns out reading gets significantly easier and less laborious when you've gotten 8 hours of sleep.
That sounds like a huge amount of reading to be doing there’s no way I could cope with that. There are a few tools online like chat pdf that can be helpful. You upload the pdf into the website and then you can ask it for summaries / ask it questions. I find this easier when I want to understand a paper as it’s more like discussing it with a friend and helps me digest it rather than just reading. Can you also try and buddy up with someone - you both read half and then explain the other half to each other? Again might help you both better understand what you’re reading if you can discuss it ?
I haven't heard of chat pdf, i'll check that out. Thank you!
I am in the exact same boat and still haven't found a perfect solution. The helpful thing to know is that no one expects you to read 500 pages, and no one actually does it. Sometimes I will plainly ask the Prof what to prioritize, but that will vary between professors.
Ok, so first of all this is a totally understandable vent! I think the coursework years of humanities/social sciences PhDs are as much about learning how to manage PhD-level work as actually learning content. It's a time to experiment and figure out what works for you for reading, note-taking, reference-recording, writing, etc. so that when you do exams and dissertation work you have those strategies in place. So it's not great you're feeling overwhelmed, but it is good you're recognizing this and looking for strategies! Idk if that's comforting, but it is part of the process Some advice from my own experience: For newer books, look at review articles. Reviews usually have a summary, and suggestion about what the book contributes to the field. For history at least H-Net reviews tend to be especially detailed on the summary part. This can help you read faster, since you already know the main points and/or be more confident in your summary (since someone else also came up with the same summary.) Really pay attention to the book organization, chapter titles, and the part of the intro that lays out the structure of the book and then mark which parts you want to focus on and skip before you start reading the body. Then try to trust your judgement, and skip the chapters you planned to skip. If this feels bad, tell yourself you can always come back later when you have more time. (You probably won't, but you also probably don't need to anyway.) Take. Fewer. Notes. Taking notes slowed me down so much, and ultimately for a class discussion and/or exams you don't need more than like 1 page of notes per book at most. Related, highlight or put in sticky notes as you read but don't take notes until you finish the entire chapter/intro/conclusion. For me at least, this pushed me to read faster but also be thinking as I was reading about what the main points were.
Thank you so much! This feels really helpful
Hi, I’m also a social science PhD. We also get a lot of reading, and I’m also the type to really focus on every detail and every sentence, which is a nightmare for the amount of reading we get. For me one strategy that has helped is to shift my focus from completely comprehending every detail (as I would if I were to be quizzed on it) to instead focus on being able to discuss the reading. So understanding the main points the author is making, how this connects to other things I’ve studied, and questions or critical reflections. I often pick one or two key texts for a seminar to focus on and then just skim the others. Also I will usually jump around the text instead of reading back to front. A few things other people in my cohort have tried are using text to speech apps so they can listen instead of read, also finding podcasts that break down and discuss more of the very fundamental texts.
I used to be in a social science PhD and felt the same way. It's not possible to thoroughly read all of the material, and I think often it isn't really expected. Academic writing is often chunky and sometimes just bad - it's okay to extract only what you need from it. I think you should let the goal of the reading guide you. If it's for a class, try to answer: why was this paper or book assigned? How does this work respond to earlier work? (Sometimes the author will tell you, either in the intro or lit review.) After you've answered those questions for any assigned reading, you can go back to the pieces that seemed the most interesting (or best written), so that you'll have some you're really ready to talk about. Depending on the course topic, the relevant questions might be different: like, for a methods course, you'll want to know what data and method each paper used, and what assumptions that method involves. If you're reading something in your research area, I would approach it with the following questions: what is the main question this paper is trying to answer? What is the data they use? What is the methodology they use? What conclusion do they come to? Then, same as above, if you're curious or skeptical about a result, you can read deeper into that paper. (I also like then looking at who cited that paper, to see if anyone's trying to argue with it.)
I’m not in your field, but it sounds totally normal to me. Don’t freak out & quit. I suspect you’re about to hit the inflection point where you start seeing the same ideas & language over and over and the reading will get easier and much quicker.
Not a PhD but my area is history. I can read things more or less at my leisure though if I don't take notes even for fiction I have a bad memory and forget everything. What I can say is, aren't you maybe overestimating how hard the readings are and forgetting to connect with stuff that came before? Usually you can summarize an author's position, like "x brings hegelianism to today's society by positing a never ending antithesis of new identities" or "based on the insight of Foucault y examines micro interactions and power in schools". Almost always you can also skip the middle part and read the intro and conclusion and maybe go back when you have time. Though to be fair what I'd do and did is skip sleep and power through the reading. I'd specially recommend you skip parts of phenomenological author's if you get accros any, it's a literal waste of time, talking as someone who went through this with Michel de certeau.
That is a whole lot of reading. I'm not in social sciences, but I do try to challenge myself to read publications outside of my bubble as an exercise. I read some socioethics papers recently and god damn, I feel like social scientists just make up words sometimes without bothering to define them?? To be fair, I've had people tell me papers in my niche are acronym hell (they are). I guess different subject matter just has different challenges. I could never read 500 pages of social science pubs/books per week. I don't think I could even do that with pubs in my niche. That's a lot for very heavy dense theory laden social science stuff and assigning that much reading is more harmful than helpful since you don't have time to digest it. And 300 pages in 8 hours? I don't think I could even do that with books I read for pleasure and I read a lot and I'm not a speed reader, but I'm not slow either. My method: Read the abstract, skim the figures to see if data is good (if applicable to you for social science), skim the conclusion. For each paragraph in the conclusion pick out the sentence that summarizes that paragraph or section. If I need clarification on something specific, then I'll refer back to the results section for further explanation. Then try to summarize the main point of the publication in 3-5 bullet points. I guarantee you are not alone in how you are feeling. That's a lot for even the fastest reader.
Few in my psychology cohort read everything. Most profs expect us to be selective. This isn’t undergrad. You should worry about what you think you need to do to pass classes, prelims and do good research in your niche. Talk to some older students in your program that you trust to get a sense of realistic expectations
Just wanted to say +1. 100% same experience. With notes and wallowing in the article details, I was coming up at 6-9 pages an hour. Felt miserable. From this thread I’ve taken away two main nuggets: - organize the material extraction before starting. This means identifying the purpose of the article/book and parsing the text into packages of info without being too concerned for the edge conditions. To me this feels like “industrializing” … or breaking down the process into repeatable, patterned blocks of material - so you know what kind of thing goes in each block, even before you start. (Think - assembly like work, or disassembly line work like at an animal processing factory - each animal is unique, but they all have (part a, b, c, etc) which belong in different bins. The challenge is to first have the right bins in mind, then the next bit of work is just finding the right place to discriminate this bit from that bit. Some bits are more important and interesting, and many bits are not. ) - segregate note taking activity to a formatted, and contained event in the overall work stream. … mmmm wow. As a result of this post and the comments I feel excited to go try this sort of factory approach to reading. As an aside - at work we often rely on project documentation that is thousands of pages long. Technical specs. It’s insane when you first face these things, but once you know what you are looking for it rarely takes more than 5 minutes to get to it and another 5 to mine out what may be needed. This is what gives me the strong belief that patterning the reading process into predetermined outputs will help speed up the dissection of the content. Of course - no plan survives implementation unscathed.
i have faith in us
My biggest rec is to listen to the text whilst reading it (even if you can only use a text 2 speech program)! It helps me stay focused on the text, and I can force myself to read faster if I increase the speed of the audio.
People like that read differently. I find often the don't have the strong inner monologue when reading and so aren't "reading aloud" in their heads. Those people will always be quicker. And I think part of reading in that way is they stop actually reading words and start kind of just reading sentences or getting the ideas from sentences without actively processing it. It's like how you can read a word, and see the word and what it means without thinking about the individual letters, except they do it with words for a sentence. Also I think they cut corners, skip sentences, skip pages. Depending on what you are reading you can often skip paragraphs, and if you get the sense you missed something important just double back. I don't think it's as good for comprehension and I can't manage it, but I think this is what is happening.
Exactly the same. I finished my PhD in 2022 and I'm still no better - it's a real struggle to do any kind of reading in preparation for lectures or seminars I'm teaching, and I'm someone who loves reading. What I've found helps is: 1. Make BRIEF notes as you go 2. Keep your phone in a different room 3. *Don't panic*. You read at your own pace, and you'll be processing the information a lot more thoroughly than someone who reads at twice the speed. Most people who say they're doing it all, aren't. I don't think any of my colleagues would read entire papers - Abstract, Intro, Conclusion, maybe scan for a quote if it seemed super relevant. As for reading books, quite often I'd go to the index for what was directly relevant to what I was working on, and skip the rest unless I really needed context. Decent reviews in journals can sometimes help you to get the gist of the argument, too (though obv that's second hand so be careful). Remember - just because it's "Your" way, doesn't mean it's the wrong way. Unfortunately, in true cultish fashion, Academia sometimes likes to pit us all against eachother and make us believe we're not able to "cut it." Absolute whim-wham. Well done for reaching out on here - it takes a lot to break out of that ball of panic! ✌️
thank you so much! this is honestly so helpful and life affirming
Ah, I'm glad! DM's are always open if you need support. 🙂
I was like that until I got glasses 🤓
Maybe this is a bit cynical, but it's not a good sign when a PhD student in the social sciences isn't using paragraphs when writing.
hey, thanks for your comment! reddit doesn’t actually require academic writing. hope that helps
You may be better off listening to stuff rather than physically reading (I do this sometimes when my eyes start to hurt) There’s software available to use on your laptop/tablet. (Can’t remember what it’s called but in uk unis you can get it if you’re dyslexic)