It sounds simple, even self-evident. If you want to learn by your reading, you are asking the activity to change you. You want to know more than you did before, to understand better, to experience beauty or humor or truth, and thereby to gain power with which to do other things you want to do. It's not going to work merely to give space in your brain, temporarily, to somebody else's words, as if you were a storage-closet that could contain Apennine orogeny at one moment and Etruscan hydraulic engineering at another, and never allow a particle of the one to be seized on by the other's technology. Inertness stops bodies of knowledge from enriching one another or you. Instead, engage with your reading: give it not only space but traction. Help it to become able to return value to you. But how? Many university Learning-Support Services recommend versions of something called SQ3R. Francis Pleasant Robinson formulated these practical steps of enacting a commitment to learning through reading, in a series of books and revised editions from 1941 (Diagnostic and Remedial Techniques for Effective Study) to 1970 (Effective Study, 4th edn.). Robinson's steps of SQ3R were Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review. Some variants insert a W for Write, or alter the old-fashioned verb "recite" to Recall or (with odious contrivance) wRite: Robinson included writing within his step Recite. Another variant gets called SQ4R as it adds an R for Relate - more significantly than the variants that add wRite or Record to the orignial SQ3R as a separate step. But these recommendations are generally described in terms of reading in a textbook that pre-digests a fixed lesson. Original learning, by contrast, can be pursued by reading productively in primary sources, analyzing, developing, and testing ideas, and forming new understandings when you put your sources into different connections. The following schema adapts SQ3R to this more creative, rigorous, engaging challenge:

• Survey: With this step, you orient your attention in relationship to the reading you're about to perform and alert yourself to the potential it bears to inform you. Use external cues where they're available: what topic does the syllabus indicate for the class-meeting for which this material is assigned? what is the book or the chapter called? Note any introductory material provided to you with the source. Then skim the source-material itself. Your goal for this step is to establish what the sources you're looking at have to do with the concerns of your course. You're preparing to focus. Focus enables you to read efficiently.
• Question: With this step you target a starter-set of concerns you will address as you read. They are the means by which you take charge of your reading. Within the broader frame of relevance you've identified by your Survey of your primary sources, formulate a couple of specific questions you want to find answers for in your reading. If your instructor has suggested study-questions, use them for a guide, but always make the questions your own by formulating them for yourself. They will enable you to read with a sense of mission and identify specific payoffs: you won't be just moving through a certain amount of text, but your activity will have a more definite shape and it will offer more concrete satisfactions.
  • If your course is focused on literary or artistic representation, you'll probably always want to include a question or two about how the representation works: how does the literary text develop a story-line? how does the image reflect its medium as well as its content? and so forth.
  • Many primary sources invite different questions depending on the type of inquiry you're pursuing. If you were reading a literary text, Hesiod's Works and Days for example, in a class focused on Classical mythology, you might want to see how its representations of Zeus and other divinities compare to other mythological stories. If you were reading the same text in a course about women in the Classical world, you might want to follow what ideas about female beings, goddesses and human women, the male persona of the text expresses. If you were reading it in a course about the history and economy of Archaic Greece, you might want to discover what ways of earning a living the text discusses and what risks and resources it associates with each of them.
  • The goal for your Questions is to start articulating your focus for your reading. But stay ready for unanticipated discoveries too.
• Read, Recite, & Record: Read the text or examine the visual source, with your questions in mind, find answers, and write down the answers in the form of brief notes. It's very important to process information in this stage (the step Robinson called Recite). Don't copy or highlight text extensively. By distilling what you read, and identifying kernels of meaning, you create a token that can re-activate fuller memories. An undigested mass of stuff you suppose must be relevant to something, is just so much work you leave yourself to have to start figuring out later, when you're no longer in the groove. Use this phase of your process also to note also additional elements of the source that appear to be interesting or important: leave yourself breadcrumbs for further explorations.
• Relate: With this step you connect the information you have just Read, Recited, & Recorded to other information you command. Integrate your new learning with your knowledge overall. What surprised you? Why? How does it change what you thought before? What patterns does this new item of learning start to form - in itself or together with other things you knew before? What new questions does it raise? Record brief notes on the connections you make in this step, too. Relating is especially profitable with primary sources, since they don't come to you filtered through a secondary-source author's ideas about what you're "supposed" to learn from them. Your active engagement with the sources becomes the generative force of new learning. And because the sources come to you from a multi-dimensional world, you will be able to connect them to more things than only the initial emphasis that brought them into your course-material. Every connection you make will add dimension to your understanding. Your engagement with what you've newly gained, as you Relate it to other learning, also makes it more memorable to you.
• Review: Periodically, return to the primary-source course-work you have done and make sure you remain in command of it. Once over at the end of the week and once more in preparation for the exam usually make a good regimen. If just looking at the items on your original assignment doesn't call to mind your answers to your Questions and the other information that you Read or Related as worth Recording, look back at your notes. If on the first Review things are still fuzzy, return to the primary source and repeat SQ3R with the aim of writing more helpful notes. Talk with other students and with your instructor to work through any difficulties you have with the material. In Reviewing for the exam, ideally you'll have already built a clear picture of the sources' most important significance for what you're studying, and will need to look back at the originals only to solidify your memory of details worth referring to when you are proving an argument.

Revised 18 June 2019 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/