Grad School Essentials: A Crash Course in Scholarly Skills - Softcover

Shore, Zachary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520288300 ISBN 13: 9780520288300

Verlag: University of California Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Bridging the gap between undergrad and grad school, this short and humorous guide gives you the tools to navigate and excel in your graduate studies.

What’s the hardest part of grad school? It’s not simply that the workload is heavy and the demands are high. It’s that too many students lack efficient methods to let them do their best. Professor Zachary Shore aims to change this. With humorous, lively prose, Professor Shore teaches you to master the five most crucial skills you need to succeed: how to read, write, speak, act, and research at a higher level. Each chapter in this no-nonsense guide outlines a unique approach to acquiring a skill and then demonstrates how to enhance it. Through these concrete, practical methods, Grad School Essentials will save you time, elevate the quality of your work, and help you to earn the degree you seek.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zachary Shore is Associate Professor of History at the Naval Postgraduate School and Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is the winner of Harvard’s Derek Bok award for teaching excellence and the author of four previous books. He can be reached at ZacharyShore.com.

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“Zachary Shore's Grad School Essentials is simply terrific: pithy, engaging, full of good advice about writing, reading, researching, presenting, and behaving in general. Aimed at grad students in the humanities and social sciences, this book's many ideas and techniques are also relevant to those in the sciences and to undergraduates. As a matter of fact, most of my faculty colleagues would benefit from studying this book, as I did.”—John Perry, Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University, and author of The Art of Procrastination

"Do you want to read, write, and speak with more insight, clarity, and efficiency? If you’re like most of us, your answer will be simple: yes. Shore’s fine little book will show you how. Brief and jargon-free, it’s a model of the methods that any good scholar should follow.”—Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History, New York University, and author of Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education

"This witty and highly readable book smartly cuts through the mysteries of higher education and reduces them to clear, manageable steps. Grad School Essentials is a useful book for graduate students everywhere."—Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director, Annenberg Scholars Program in Culture and Communication, University of Pennsylvania

“This down-to-earth, accessible guide offers extremely valuable insights into reading, writing, and the often-ignored topic of students' academic demeanor. Every time I teach a course for undergraduates or graduates, I face students who struggle to perform the tasks that this book addresses. At last I can refer them to a resource they can truly use. I wish that all my students would assimilate the lessons Zachary Shore provides."—Michael Hechter, Foundation Professor of Political Science, Arizona State University, and Professor of Sociology, University of Copenhagen

“Zachary Shore has written a remarkably helpful guide to the crucial skills that students need as they navigate their way through undergrad and graduate school. With catchy phrases and easy-to-remember guidelines, Shore speaks to the student in his own distinctive voice. Shore is himself a phenomenon, zipping through graduate school at challenging institutions, discovering neglected archives, writing five books, and accumulating a host of awards and fellowships. His many successes give him the authority to write a book of this kind.”—Arlene Saxonhouse, Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan

"Zachary Shore has managed to illuminate the path of doctoral research. His brilliant, clear, and relatable explanations along with clever humour have equipped me with -- and made sense of -- the 'missing link' I felt, and earnestly searched for, during my three years of doctoral research.”—Bernice Gonzalez, Universitat de Barcelona

"This easy read walks the reader through concrete, relatable examples from academic environments, and encourages the student to engage in clever strategies to make the most of their time and their academic effort. ... This book will definitely help graduate students earn that degree they covet."—Fabio Correa Duran, graduate student in Anthropology, the Ohio State University "Incredibly engaging and relatable."—Sarah A. Hinkelman, graduate student in Anthropology, the Ohio State University

"An honest look into the life of a grad student, offering anecdote and nuggets of advice throughout that reassure and relieve the anxieties we all experience."—Emily L. Knox, graduate student in Knowlton School of Architecture, the Ohio State University

"Grad School Essentials does not pull punches. Obtaining a graduate degree is hard but this book can help. It has changed the way I approach my readings and I'd recommend it to any grad student who feels like they don't belong here."—Tom Pitkin, graduate student in Anthropology, the Ohio State University

"As a graduate student in China, I found this book very useful!  It helped my skills in reading, writing and researching, and the methods of solving problems work very well and are easy to understand."—Zhihua Li, graduate student in teaching Chinese, Harbin Normal University

“This book will make you fall in love with academic research! It suddenly is less intimidating and challenging! This book will remain with you years after you graduate, helping you when you need to blog/teach/research or write your proposal for your next  degree!”—Saloni Lakhia,  doctoral student at the International Christian University in Tokyo

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Grad School Essentials

A Crash Course in Scholarly Skills

By Zachary Shore

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28830-0

Contents

Introduction, 
The Skills You Need, 
1. How to Read, Part I Dissecting a Text, 
2. How to Read, Part II Critiquing a Text, 
3. How to Write, 
4. How to Speak, 
5. How to Act, 
6. How to Research, 

CHAPTER 1

How to Read, Part I

Dissecting a Text

Have you ever had the following experience? You are hunched over a book, reading steadily along. The monotone monologue in your head is encountering a stream of sentences. You are turning pages. You are in a trance, when suddenly, as if shocked by an unseen cattle prod, you are jolted out of your semiconscious state to discover, "My God. I have no idea what I've been reading for the past twenty minutes!"

You are not alone. Nearly everyone has been a Book Zombie at some point, probably at many points. This is the result of reading passively, and you must never do it again.

Passive reading is the act of opening a book without direction and attempting to comprehend it by starting at the beginning and reading through to the end. To read with no method, no plan, and no targeted objective makes no sense. We call that "linear" reading, and it cannot help you when you are actually searching for something very specific. It would be like looking for Mr. Zachary Z. Zypster in the New York phone book and saying, "Gee, whiz. This is an awfully big book. I guess I'll start reading from the beginning, at Aaron Archibald Ababa, and keep reading until I find Mr. Zypster. He must be in here somewhere."

I have good news. It turns out that not only do phone books have a way of organizing their information for easy searching, so do scholarly texts. You just need to know how they are structured, so you can find what you need.

I have two goals for this chapter:

1. To save you a great deal of time.

2. To boost both your reading comprehension and retention.

You will achieve these ends by reading actively, not passively. I'm going to offer you a five-step method for active reading. Once you learn it (and this method will admittedly take some time to master), your scholarly performance will dramatically improve — as will your mental health, emotional well-being, and overall shine.

Before we turn to the method, I need to stress some important caveats. This reading method is not appropriate for all texts. It can work extremely well with most scholarly books and articles in the humanities and social sciences, and to a lesser extent with comparable works in the natural sciences. It is not appropriate for canonical works from the premodern and classical periods — the kind we use as original sources, such as Plato's The Republic, or Machiavelli's The Prince. This is because the method is designed to help you jump around within a text, locate the most salient points, and skim over the less pithy parts. Most modern scholarly writing should lend itself to this process. Less-contemporary and classical writings often are not structured in the same way. They also are probably being assigned so that you will give them a very close read. And that brings me to another crucial caveat.

Read closely and carefully. I am about to teach you how to move in a nonlinear way through a text, but this does not mean that you should not try to read it all. If you have the time, you should certainly read a work in full. That's what I do. But I also use this method first. I jump around inside the text until I have a strong grasp of the author's main point. Only then do I go back and read the text more fully. Naturally, if you don't have time to read the entire work — and often in school you simply won't have the time you really need — this method will at least equip you to find the work's essentials, so that you can follow the discussion in class.

Here is the most basic concept to absorb: you must read for the thesis, not just the content. The thesis is the author's main argument, and everyone has an argument. If you are drinking at a bar and listen to people's conversations, you'll find that where there is debate, there are theses. Picture a conversation between two loutish, drunken sports fans. One extols the virtues of the Yankees; his interlocutor is praising the Red Sox. At root, the Yankees fan is arguing that the pitching staff makes his entire team superior. That's his thesis. And in order to support his thesis our slobbering enthusiast sputters out in slurred speech the statistics of individual pitchers in the starting rotation. Those stats are his evidence. They form the backbone of his thesis. Part of your job as an undergraduate or grad student is to spot the backbone of every thesis, locate its weakest links, and break them.

There are two main reasons why you must read for thesis, not just content. The first is that academia is all about arguments, and students must learn to critique those arguments. Spotting and dissecting an argument (which we call a thesis) is your primary task with any text. You might be assigned five different books on the French Revolution. How many times do you really need to read that a king lost his head? Isn't once enough? You have five different books because each author has a different interpretation of those events. Your first task, therefore, is to identify each author's particular interpretation as expressed in her thesis. Your second task is to take that thesis apart by finding its weakest links. (Starting to get it?) In essence, you are on a search-and-critique mission when you read. You are searching for the thesis, and then you aim to critique it. The "critique" part means that you will be assessing the book's strengths as well as its weaknesses. Your critique must always be balanced. But it helps to begin with a critical eye. No one writes a perfect book, and that's okay. The aim is to advance our understanding. The question is whether any given author has moved us in the right direction. Do her thesis and her evidence stand up under close scrutiny? If they do, then we can consider it a meaningful contribution to the scholarly literature, because it brings us closer to the truth.

Just to be extra clear, since this approach is crucially important to your success, let's try a simple example of active reading. We'll do it by identifying and critiquing the thesis in a brief clip from an old movie. In a scene from the 1982 comedy film Airplane II, we see two different news broadcasts. On the American news, the anchorman states that a terrible fire raged through downtown Moscow, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Next we see the Soviet broadcast of the same event, in which the anchorman says something like: "A glorious fire blazed through downtown Moscow, clearing the way for a brand new tractor factory." Although you were probably born long after the Soviet Union collapsed, you might know that Soviet news was highly censored, downplaying or concealing any problems in Soviet society. So let's imagine that we had to critique both interpretations of this event. What would we do? Let's start with the Soviet broadcast.

First, you need to identify the anchor's thesis. The fire was a positive event for Moscow, and perhaps for Soviet society more generally. In contrast, we can say that the American anchor's interpretation was that the fire was a negative event, leaving death and destruction in its wake....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520288300
• ISBN 13: 9780520288300
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 156
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar