Using an Index and Academic Reading Skills
Watch this video to see how to use an index in a book.
Welcome to this New York Film Academy library video tutorial. In this particular video we’re going to be going over the concepts of academic reading as well as the importance of using indexes of books while doing research. So, you’ll see here that I’m going to be using an ebook for this particular demonstration, and I also have an article opened here across the top of the page.
So, a quick word on academic reading before I get too far into the book itself. There’s another video in our tutorial list that really does, I think, a very good job of highlighting study skills and how to read effectively when you’re doing your homework, or you know, doing anything for a particular class. It’s a very good video on that particular topic. The little addition that we wanted to touch on here was the idea of reading efficiently and effectively while doing research in particular. So, you know, rather than probably the way most people conceive of reading, like a novel or even, perhaps a chapter of a textbook, academic reading in the context of research means not reading the entirety of an article. In fact, very seldom will you want to take the time to fully read an article that you’re using as evidence. But, rather, you’re trying to get down to the information that you need as quickly as possible and moving on with your paper writing process, or with your research process. Because oftentimes what you’re doing during this is you’re trying to find evidence to support an argument.
So, looking at this article here, you’ll see I’m using this just as an example. And I’m going to open up the full text of this journal article. Now, much like when you’re writing a paper, oftentimes papers that you find in our databases are going to be written in a similar way. There’s going to be, you know, usually kind of like a thesis statement or an introduction paragraph at the beginning of the article. They’re going to go into their evidence as they work through, and you can see they’re citing a lot of sources as they go. You know, their citations all throughout this of them supporting their argument in their paper. And, of course, by the time you get to the end here, there’s going to be usually kind of like a wrapup paragraph. Oftentimes it’s going to reiterate the thesis statement, sometimes provide a little bit of further evidence and then they, you know, are done. And, of course, there’s going to be a bibliography or a works cited page at the end of the article outlining their evidence for what they said. So, you already kind of know, right, just at a quick glance where to focus your energies, right? If you are looking just for a general overview of their article, read the first paragraph quickly. And maybe even use that as a guideline to where to go next in the article to find evidence for what they’re saying that might be useful to you. The other thing that’s incredibly useful in most texts that you’re going to find in our databases is that they are word searchable. Right, so if I hit ctrl F or command F on a Mac, I can search specific words of this text. Like, Hollywood, for instance, here. And I can then cycle directly through and find all instances of that word. So if you are looking for a specific word or phrase, don’t waste time reading the entire article, go directly to those words in that article. It’s going to save you just a tremendous amount of time. You know, this article that I’m looking at here is only five pages, but oftentimes these articles will be twenty, twenty-five, thirty pages sometimes long, so you’re going to want to move efficiently through what you’re doing.
And, the same thing goes for books. So, for this particular example I’m going to go ahead and open up, I have options, right, I can look at a PDF version of this book, or I can look at an epublication, full text. I’m going to choose the epub option for this particular demonstration. So you’ll see from the ebook here, that this particular version of the book, rather than the PDF, has been hyperlinked. So I can go to the Table of Contents page, for instance, and I can click directly through to a specific chapter. That alone is incredibly useful. And, similar to the article we were just looking at, I can also use command F or ctrl F and search specific words within the document. So, this could very well, you know, very quickly speed up my research in this book. But, the other thing to keep in mind, especially when using, you know, academically rigorous books, is that most of the time they’re going to have an index. And, this of course holds true for physical books as well as ebooks, the same principle applies. Ebooks in particular, ones like this that are hyperlinked make things that much easier on you in that they hyperlink all their reference points. So rather than having to scroll back up through the text to find what you’re looking for, you can just click directly through on a hyperlink and it will bring you directly to what is being referenced in the index. Again, the same principle applies in a physical book. You would just then need to, of course, flip to the corresponding page for what you’re looking at. But, you can see how this could save you, again, quite a bit of time. Rather than reading an entire chapter of a book or multiple paragraphs of a chapter looking for what you need from it, you can instead just click directly to what you need, cite the source, you know, do what you need to do with the content and move on. Go to your next bit of evidence that you’re using to support your argument.
So, this is what we mean when we talk about academic reading. Again, the other video highlighted on our website goes far further into depth on how to read effectively for your classes. This particular video is hopefully a good kind of primer on how to research quickly and effectively. So, of course, if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to library staff, and hopefully you found this useful.