Critical Reading : Putting it into practice

Identify the Main Idea

So, at this point in the session, you've thought about how you read and looked at ways to make your reading more productive. You've highlighted any questions you have about the texts that you might want to come back to. You've thought about how you make notes and identified some tools to help you do this more efficiently and you've also started to think about what the main ideas behind the article might be and whether you agree with them or not. So now we're going to touch on how you might pick out the key ideas from an article so that you can engage with it critically and make useful notes for your revision or writing up process. These three points that you can see on the slide are the main ones that you might like to keep in mind while reading an article. An author's main idea is usually a statement of their opinion rather than a fact that is already known and it will usually be part of the hypothesis that they've attempted to test within the article however, in order to stand up to academic rigour and be part of a peer reviewed journal that opinion still needs to be supported by evidence in case you've not come across this term before. Peer review is essentially academic quality control where other experts will read work before it is published and try to identify any problems or assumptions that need to be altered before publication. Evidence is vital to the process of peer review and you should always examine an author's ideas to see if they're supported. This can come in the form of references to other papers or findings through their engagement with other literature and also from their own investigations, which might include lab results or statistical findings. These findings should be clearly understandable and reproducible so that the findings can be tested by others to reach the same conclusions. In order to engage critically with an article, you also need to decide whether you agree or disagree with the author's ideas and think about why that might be the case. Have you read other articles that say something different? Does something about the argument not make sense to you? Or has the author made an assumption that undermines that hypothesis? There are techniques you can use to help you identify and record the author's argument in the text. Think about all the parts that come together to make an argument and then look for them in the different sections of the article. The introduction will generally tell you what they did. The literature review should give you an idea of why they did it and what other people think about the subject. The methodology will tell you how they did it. If you want to know why they did it in a specific way, the ethics section is usually a good place to look to know what they found. Look in the results, the discussion section will help you to understand what this means, and the conclusion should tell you the author's reaction to what they found. Obviously, not all articles are structured in the same way and books even less so, but this should give you an idea about where to look when you can answer these questions and try writing your summary of the argument.