 Okay, so in this video, I'm going to be talking a little bit about reading and evaluating some of the sources and some approaches that you might be taking in order to do this. And I'm going to be focusing specifically for my example on a research article, but some of the tips you can apply elsewhere. So as a starting point, it's a good idea to kind of just realize what you're getting into first, kind of like survey the landscape of the article first before you actually get into the very particular details of it. This can be especially useful when you're reading dense scholarly literature where you maybe don't understand all the concepts perfectly, but you want to get a general idea so that you can evaluate whether or not that source is actually going to do the things that you needed to in terms of the rhetorical moves or the source types or just, you know, speaking to the concepts that you really need in order to move forward. So as a starting point with this article, I'm just going to make note that the document is 10 pages long. There is a title page here that I have, and then I have some references to. So the actual text of it is not that long. But that is a good indicator to me that, first of all, it is probably a peer reviewed scholarly journal. I have some other clues here, such as the fact that it's coming from a university press as well. And then as I scroll through, I get a few other pieces of information. But in terms of the page numbers, one of the things that can be helpful oftentimes is to kind of figure out how much time you're going to be spending for each part of the reading process with the article that you're going to be using. So in this case, I probably have something in the neighborhood of eight pages of actual reading that I might do if I were to read it straight through. But what I'm going to do is give myself sort of permission upfront to take 10 minutes to actually kind of do a skim read a type approach that I'm going to be getting that information I need about it to determine whether or not I'm going to be moving forward with it and understand the basic concepts of it before I move forward. So part of that's going to be taking a look at the abstract, making sure that the abstract will tell me how that source is going to be speaking to my sub questions and therefore my inquiry questions. So if it's not doing that, then it's time to probably move on. For many research articles, you get this highly structured abstract that you see here, especially in the medical related literature, which is wonderful because it makes your job a little bit easier. You can see the different parts of it. Plus we can see that there's a methodology section. That's a really good sign that this is a research article and therefore going to be useful on our topic. One of the things though that I want to know in relation to this article is whether or not the people who wrote it have sort of the authority to be speaking to this particular topic. And so what I have here are little clues that are going to give me some of that information. It lets me know the institutional affiliation of each one of the authors. The fact that there are multiple authors is also a good sign that this is a peer reviewed research article. And so seeing those pieces of information, that's helpful to me to know that this is probably pretty reliable in terms of that type of information. So having kind of figured some of that out, taking a look through the article, maybe I even took a look at some of the charts and graphs along the way, I'm going to then take an approach where I'm going to do non-linear readings so that I can get the most information out of this article in the best way possible. So I'm going to start out and this is presumably moving into what they have labeled as the background section and the abstract, but it doesn't have a label right at the start here. But I'm going to be reading that part where it's the first part kind of gives me some overview of what the topic is all about. But once I see that portion of it where it is telling me about the methodology, that's a really good place to make a jump. Unless you're specifically interested in learning more about methodologies and that's what you're reading the research for, that's something where it's better to come back to that a little bit later. And so what I would do in this particular instance is jump towards the end of the article and basically get to that important part of it where I'm going to be looking for something where it says discussion or conclusions. And the reason for that is because that's usually where you find some of the best information that you're going to have on that article. It's going to tell you all sorts of things that can be really useful such as recapping what the topic was all about, what the research was all about, plus it will also tell you any limitations that are associated with the research. So things that you're going to be able to conclude based on the research that they have and it's also going to identify in many cases some other areas of further inquiry that need to take place. And so it will basically be taking all the information, the study that they did, the literature review that they did and kind of wrapping it all up and basically telling you what it all means and where things need to go from there. Once you've read that and if you feel good about it and you basically you'll be able to have a very good hypothesis about what your article is going to be all about and how you're going to be able to use it. That's the point where it can be helpful to go back and along the way, by the way, before we even got to the conclusion we could have been reading things like the charts and graphs that can give some really good information about the particular article. But once I read the intro, the conclusion, then oftentimes I'll go back to the part where I see a methodology and I'll take a closer look at the information there. But even as I'm reading through some of these parts, one of the things that can be helpful is to even give yourself the liberty to skim a portion of it to get a good idea about what it's about, especially for that dense and difficult to understand information and then to come back and do a more careful read after that because it's easier to pay attention to something once you kind of have an idea of where it's going when it comes to scholarly literature. So I might give myself permission just to read the first paragraphs of each one of the paragraphs that we have here. The highlight is showing up a little bit strange on this particular PDF, but it kind of gives you the idea of just reading those first sentences of each of the paragraphs and kind of going through it that way so I can have some pretty good information about what it's all about. And then I can kind of use the different sections of this paper to move through it. So another thing that can be useful with reading, especially when you're reading online off of screens is, and this will apply whether it's a research article or other sources, is to develop a hypothesis about the whole thing before you even get into it. Just kind of tell yourself, you know, what am I anticipating getting out of this particular source? What might it be about? And so that you kind of have that objective and directive that is driving where you're going with your reading process. So if you're reading towards an outcome, it's really helpful to know what that outcome is going to be. The other thing that can be helpful is again to kind of give yourself some structured time around what you're going to be committing to. So especially when you're reading online where it's very easy to get distracted, you might tell yourself, okay, I'm going to be taking 15 minutes for that methodology section or I'm going to do a close read on it for 15 minutes so that I know that I'm going to be, I have to set aside that amount of time. I can't get distracted by Facebook. I can't get distracted by family. This is something where I'm going to make sure that I have that time to actually get into in-depth on those topics and explore the issues.