You Do Need Wider Reading

Okay so you’re me from a few years ago and you’re sitting in English class and everyone keeps talking about the wider reading you’re (supposed to be) doing but you have no clue what that is or what’s going on. We’ve all been there at some point.

So… what is wider reading anyway?

It’s not scary, for a start. Wider reading is reading you do around your subject or that particular topic within that subject. If you’re interested in the topic then you probably do this already and just don’t realise it.

A practical example would be that you’re reading Dracula in class but outside of that you’re reading other vampire novels and looking up opinions on Dracula and Bram Stoker’s writing. That counts as wider reading.

I know what it is now, but how do you do it?

This is one of the hardest things to explain in a broad sense. For me, it’s easiest with Literature than it is with history, science or any of the other subjects I took at GCSE level.

You know when you have a textbook and the author puts in who they’ve referenced? That’s a good place to start, find those books or articles and read them (more about academic reading in a later post). From here you see what’s relevant to your studies and what isn’t, then you can go back and look at who those relevant authors reference or use the key words search on a library database to find relevant books, articles, journals and more.

This then lets you build up your wider knowledge of a subject than just that one thing you’ve been told to read. Once you start doing it for one thing – looking up more than just the required reading – you’ll end up getting into the habit of doing that and before you know it you’ll have a wealth of knowledge to pick from when you’re writing.

Read the books, articles and all of that and don’t be afraid to criticise what you’re reading! Not every author will write things that are what you agree with – I remember tearing some papers apart in my essays in uni because the author was dismissive of film adaptations of classic literature. Look at who was writing, why, when, where and what in. You can look at biases the author has, current events that would impact the writing, and in what sort of place it’s published to create arguments for and against the statements in paper.

Great – but I don’t know where to find it?

My advice is always to start with your libraries! Check out your school, university and local city libraries to see what they’re offering. Use a few key words and search using the catalogues (you can find them online most of the time); if you’re looking up something about Wordsworth’s poetry, say looking at the relation of nature to experience then enter the key words and use Boolean search terms to make it more specific, something like “Wordsworth AND innocence” or “Wordsworth AND flowers”, for example.

After that use Google! It’s there! All of it! At your fingertips! Look at the articles that come up and take note of people, books and journals they’re referencing or mentioning. This is how I get a lot of my information. Google also has a great feature called Google Scholar:

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. Taken from the Google Scholar website here

You’ll also find a lot of people mentioning websites like JSTOR (which is a life saver, I love it and I will actually end up dancing around my room 99% of the time when I find the articles I need). These are great because you can search like on a library catalogue, you can save articles and get citations direct from the website! You’ve got a wealth of knowledge on here at your fingertips, and it’s easy enough to use.

---

Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.

#school #undergrad #gcse #undergraduate #postgrad #literature #alevels #gcses #postgraduate #englishliterature #university #englishlit #backtoschool #alevel #widerreading #studying