Research and Writing Seminar: Critical Reading

Session Description

Research and Writing Seminars: Develop Your Scholarly Voice. Each session in this suite of four interactive seminars integrates the learning of academic research and writing skills and is taught by a librarian in collaboration with a writing instructor. The goal of each seminar is to help you develop your own voice as an emerging scholar by enabling you to identify, situate and substantiate your arguments in the context of the scholarly discussion taking place in your discipline. The seminars are designed for humanities and social sciences undergraduate students. Graduate students might wish to consider the research-related skills offerings in the Graduate Professional Skills Program.

Take any three (3) of the four (4) seminars to earn credit on your Co-Curricular Record.

Critical Reading

Learn how to develop critical reading skills and how to incorporate them into the process of research and critical writing. This session concentrates on the skills of analysis and synthesis as they pertain to library research and academic writing. Through short lectures, interactive class discussion and hands-on exercises, you will learn to:

• Describe the scholarly communication process, including the peer review process
• Conduct university-level library research and understand the basics of the argumentative essay
• Identify different types of sources and understand their role in your research process
• Read strategically to select the best sources and recognize their most important part(s).
• Employ criteria to evaluate sources for scope, authority and bias

Key terms for this session: Peer review, 3-D Reading, Bloom’s Taxonomy, primary & secondary sources.

Location: Online via Zoom. The link to the session will be sent to you in the confirmation email upon registration.

Other seminars in this series include:

• Writing to Cite
• Annotated Bibliographies
• Literature Reviews