Abstract
The professed aim of this slim volume is to tackle a persistent issue among academics: the need to help students to read articles critically. The author is convinced that there is any amount of study skills literature designed to help students to write, but that there is very little help out there for students on how to read; ‘reading is often a blindly assumed and unexamined part of the writing process’ (p. 3).
So from the outset, academic reading is positioned as a component of academic writing. The interplay between reading and writing is a strong feature of the book, sometimes making it difficult to remember that the title of the book is about reading, since much of the content, especially in later chapters, discusses writing. That is deliberate since the author demonstrates how the two activities must be intertwined, helping students to understand that the activity of reading for academic purposes involves understanding how academics write, and the activity of writing for academic purposes will be hugely helped by reading systematically.
This systematisation of reading for academic purposes is the major focus of the book. In essence, Shon presents a coding system designed to focus readers on the key components of journal articles, so by determining which code to apply to each section of the article, the reader is processing and interpreting what they read. He is very honest in presenting in this second edition the results of using this coding system with his students; they don’t necessarily enjoy the process, finding it hard going. However, he also observes that the outcome of the process is worth the pain because students gain confidence in their reading, becoming able to discuss and review critically and thus have taken on board the key issues from their reading, rather than spending much time reading with little result to show for it.
Here is the nub of the problem faced with student reading. It involves work. This is not to say that students do not work, they do, but so often their reading of academic articles produces struggle and shallow understanding, leading to anxiety about the whole process of mining journal articles for points of relevance to their studies. The coding system presented in this book is intended to tackle this problem. In order to test it out, I attempted to learn and use the coding system for some of the chapters in the book. My conclusion was that it can be very productive, but that the process detail is a little too complex for regular use.
It is not just this coding system which is full of detail and perhaps a little cumbersome in use. I have long advocated the work of Wallace and Wray (Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates published in 2011) upon which Shon also draws. However, despite their systematic and very clear process for answering questions during critical reading and synthesising the answers to produce a sound literature review, the drawback is that the system itself is complex to apply. As a result, I find their initial five critical synopsis questions much easier to explain, and students find them easier to use, rather than attempting to adopt the whole, albeit elegant, system to their reading and writing. Since these early questions simply ask students to check their purpose for reading and have that task in mind as they question for themselves the purpose the writers pursued, how convincing the outcome and to what extent the outcomes relate to the student’s purpose, this is not too much to remember while reading, and for many students who feel daunted by journal article reading, it provides a ball of string to unravel the reading process.
In the same way, the coding system developed by Shon has some really helpful elements, which include identifying critiques of previous literature, gaps and findings in articles and applying these to a rationale for student writing. Shon introduces cues and grammatical structures to help students find and code these elements and in the process clearly explains the usual structure of journal articles in the social sciences so that the student becomes aware of patterns to look for.
The difficulties for me in this system are twofold. First, Shon is an experienced academic who has fashioned the coding system so that all aspects of a journal article can be identified and codified for completeness (with the rather strange omission of research methodology). This means that we have 14 codes to remember, and memorising three-letter acronyms for each one is not a simple task. Although Shon regularly inserts a phrase to remind the reader of the code under discussion, I found myself often turning back to pages 5 and 6 to remind myself of code meanings. The acronyms themselves are sometimes easy to spot (such as CPL for Critique of Previous Literature and RAT for Rationale), but others are more obscure (RCL meaning Results Consistent with Previous Literature and RTC meaning Results to the Contrary).
In order to explain the use of the coding system, there are many examples used for demonstration. However, instead of showing a graphic with coding notes written against sections of text, the sections of text are given, followed by a textual explanation of the coding. This provides a further difficult task for students to read, when difficulty in reading texts is the starting point. Some better graphics here would have been a great help.
The second issue for me is that some of the codes seem more helpful for academics in marking and analysing students’ work, than for the students themselves on first reading an academic article. One example here is the code MOP (Missed an Obvious Point). Would such an omission be so obvious to the student who needs a coding system to get to grips with an article? However, MOP is a useful marking tool for academics, although it sounds a bit brutal to apply these words to students’ work. Also the code RPP (Relevant Point to Pursue) might come more naturally to an academic researcher than the average student author.
I should point out that part of the coding system sets out clearly where to put the codes during reading and annotation or highlighting. There is great emphasis on putting most of the codes in the right-hand margin, while ‘reading strategy’ codes are placed in the left-hand margin. The different placement of codes makes sense, but after being told for the umpteenth time which margin to use, this reviewer began to wish she had never started the process. The point of the margin placement is to produce visual identifiers which are easy to retrieve after reading the article, pulling codes from different articles together and quickly finding specific points for synthesis. This does make a lot of sense, but has to be learned thoroughly before it becomes useful. I would make the point that for a student with a reading difficulty, particularly dyslexia, this could be very useful indeed. While coloured paper, coloured highlighters, mind maps and so on are all helpful aids for students with a reading difficulty, the correct placement of these codes, once fully mastered, would help such students greatly in revisiting articles to retrieve key points.
The final capstone of the system is to record the codes from systematic reading into RCOS (a Reading Code Organization Sheet). This feels very much like the latter chapters of Wallace and Wray’s book. It completes the process and is designed to help the student put the codes to use for their academic writing, both in producing literature reviews and in developing rationales for their own studies. The RCOS requires entry of each article’s bibliographic detail into spreadsheet or table rows and summarising in a word or two the results of findings (ROF), summary of previous literature (SPL), critique of previous literature (CPL), gaps (GAP), recommendations for future work (RFW) and points of critique (POC)/relevant points to pursue (RPP) from each article read.
We can see that this exercise is clearly beneficial but very tedious to do. Indeed, the author reports that his students had reported this as a form of medieval torture (p. 86). Even a systematic literature review published in a journal is unlikely to go into this much detail, but rather to select key points to synthesise such as methodologies (not covered in this coding system), key findings and contexts of study.
So having explored the main purpose and mechanics of the coding system produced in this book, what are my key findings and critiques? There are three. First, the purpose is to help explain and develop students’ faculty for critiquing academic articles. Rather than telling students to write critically without giving them the tools to do this, the book aims to show a method of reading and coding which forces readers to focus on what they are reading and organising their understanding of what they have read. This is offered as a process for critical reading, and it should have that result, except that criticality is also arguably a reading standpoint, where students might be encouraged to challenge and question what they read from as objective a position as they can muster. If they are engaged fully in the coding process while they read, they are in effect harnessed into a particular way of looking at the text and possibly denied the freedom to identify from the whole of the article a sense of bias or concern which could lead to more creative critique.
Second, the book seems to belong to a non-digital age. While much reading is still done on paper, increasingly ebooks and PDF format materials as well as websites and blogs provide different challenges and opportunities for annotation. We are still just beginning to find useful ways to annotate electronic media as apps come onto the market, but to ignore them completely seems strange for an updated edition.
Third, I have a concern about later chapters in the book. There is a chapter apparently testing out the applicability of the coding system on non-social science journal articles. Yet, the topic chosen for the test is Philosophy, that is, a Humanities subject, which could be argued to be quite close in form to social science articles. It could have been so useful to extend the test to articles in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subject disciplines. Another later chapter, entitled Concluding Remarks, begins with an essay on Postman (1985) and his distinction between telegraphic and typographic forms of epistemology. This is a little self-indulgent if the book is intended to be for students to learn how to read a social science article and feels like a discrete section with a different purpose. Much of the chapter then repeats the justification for the coding system which was elaborated in earlier chapters.
However, despite these criticisms, the book has the potential to interest students in a very systematic way to read academic articles. Such systems have great benefit for students who do not take easily to reading for academic purposes. Some of the codes could be helpful for most student guidance, particularly being able to identify critiques of previous literature, gaps and findings in articles and synthesising them to produce rationales for their own research, but it will take a determined academic to persist in requiring their students to apply and use the full code system. If, however, they do persist and begin to recognise the essential patterns of academic writing in the social sciences and the way they, as students, and perhaps also as budding academics, can build their own studies deeply into the foundations provided by published literature, they will, as the author proposes, become initiates in the academic community of scholarship.