Karen Rosenberg S Reading Games Strategies For Reading Scholarly

Leo Migdal

-Dec 12, 2025, 12:17 PM

karen rosenberg s reading games strategies for reading scholarly

Engaging with academic texts can be challenging especially when the intended audience is other academics and not readers who are new to a topic or conversation. While being an outsider to an academic topic can be difficult, Karen Rosenberg describes their own experience with reading difficult texts and how we can approach the process practically. Even if we don’t fully understand everything we read in an unfamiliar topic, by employing a clear reading strategy we can come away from every difficult text with a greater understanding of the topic... “If your reading assignments confound you, if they send you into slumber, or you avoid them, or they seem to take you way too long, then pay attention. Based on my experience as a frustrated student and now as a teacher of reading strategies, I have some insights to share with you designed to make the reading process more productive, more interesting,... Rosenberg, Karen.

Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing Volume 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 210-220. “If your reading assignments confound you, if they send you into slumber, or you avoid them, or they seem to take you way too long, then pay attention. Based on my experience as a frustrated student and now as a teacher of reading strategies, I have some insights to share with you designed to make the reading process more productive, more interesting,... Rosenberg, K. (2011).

Reading games: Strategies for reading scholarly sources. In Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky (Eds.), Writing spaces: readings on writing, vol. 2 (pp. 210-220). New York: Parlor Press. As a writing instructor, you want to help students reflect on and refine reading practices that are so crucial to writing and academic success.

An examination of the elements of a rhetorical reading strategy—conceptualizing reading as part of an academic conversation, reading actively (and what this looks like), figuring out primary and secondary audiences, recognizing road maps embedded... This chapter can also help your students learn to recognize and avoid employing reading strategies that don’t work: reading without grasping content, skimming or skipping text, or latching onto one minor argument without understanding... You may also download this chapter from Parlor Press or WAC Clearinghouse. Writing Spaces is published in partnership with Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse. In this essay from Writing Spaces, Karen Rosenberg shares her personal experiences as a student who needed to learn how to read academic material more effectively. She explains not only why professors ask you to read academic/scholarly journal articles (as opposed to simply using Google-able sources for research projects), but also how you can strategically approach reading such complex texts...

Her tone is informal and conversational; she wants to connect with you in order to support your success even as you engage with source material. Read Karen Rosenberg’s “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Keywords from this chapter in Writing Spaces audience, academic, critical reading, reading, reading to write, active reading, reading as joining a conversation, rhetorical reading, discourse, prior knowledge Karen Rosenburg is the Director of the Writing & Communication Center at the University of Washington Bothell. She received her Phd from the University of Washington.

Rosenburg describes her work at the Writing & Communication Center in the following way: “As the Director of the Writing Center, I have the great privilege of supporting students and faculty in creating productive... I support students through in-class workshops, teaching, and directing the Center. I support faculty through consultations on course design topics such as creating effective writing assignments, appropriate assessments, and innovative ways of integrating writing into courses” (https://www.uwb.edu/wacc/staff/karen). “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” by Karen Rosenberg can be found here. In this essay, Rosenberg shares with you her personal experiences as a student who needed to learn how to read academic material more effectively. She explains not only why professors ask you to read academic/scholarly journal articles (as opposed to simply using Google-able sources for research projects), but also how you can strategically approach reading such complex texts...

Her tone is informal and conversational; she wants to connect with you in order to support your success even as you engage with source material that may be out of your comfort zone. Deeper Reading: "Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources" by Karen Rosenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. During my first year in college, I feared many things: calculus, cafeteria food, the stained, sweet smelling mattress in the basement of my dorm. But I did not fear reading. I didn’t really think about reading at all, that automatic making of meaning from symbols in books, newspapers, on cereal boxes. And, indeed, some of my coziest memories of that bewildering first year involved reading.

I adopted an overstuffed red chair in the library that enveloped me like the lap of a department store Santa. I curled up many evenings during that first, brilliant autumn with my English homework: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. I’d read a gorgeous passage, snuggle deeper into my chair, and glance out to the sunset and fall leaves outside of the library window. This felt deeply, unmistakably collegiate. But English was a requirement—I planned to major in political science. I took an intro course my first semester and brought my readings to that same chair.

I curled up, opened a book on the Chinese Revolution, started reading, and fell asleep. I woke up a little drooly, surprised at the harsh fluorescent light, the sudden pitch outside. Not to be deterred, I bit my lip and started over. I’d hold on for a paragraph or two, and then suddenly I’d be thinking about my classmate Joel’s elbows, the casual way he’d put them on the desk when our professor lectured, sometimes resting... He was a long-limbed runner and smelled scrubbed—a mixture of laundry detergent and shampoo. He had black hair and startling blue eyes.

Did I find him sexy? Crap! How many paragraphs had my eyes grazed over while I was thinking about Joel’s stupid elbows? By the end of that first semester, I abandoned ideas of majoring in political science. I vacillated between intense irritation with my assigned readings and a sneaking suspicion that perhaps the problem was me—I was too dumb to read academic texts. Whichever it was—a problem with the readings or with me—I carefully chose my classes so that I could read novels, poetry, and plays for credit.

But even in my English classes, I discovered, I had to read dense scholarly articles. By my Junior year, I trained myself to spend days from dawn until dusk hunkered over a carrel in the library’s basement armed with a dictionary and a rainbow of highlighters. Enjoying my reading seemed hopelessly naïve—an indulgence best reserved for beach blankets and bathtubs. A combination of obstinacy, butt-numbingly hard chairs, and caffeine helped me survive my scholarly reading assignments. But it wasn’t fun. Seven years later I entered graduate school.

I was also working and living on my own, cooking for myself instead of eating off cafeteria trays. In short, I had a life. My days were not the blank canvas they had been when I was an undergraduate and could sequester myself in the dungeon of the library basement. And so, I finally learned how to read smarter, not harder. Perhaps the strangest part of my reading transformation was that I came to like reading those dense scholarly articles; I came to crave the process of sucking the marrow from the texts. If you can relate to this, if you also love wrestling with academic journal articles, take joy in arguing with authors in the margins of the page, I am not writing for you.

However, if your reading assignments confound you, if they send you into slumber, or you avoid them, or they seem to take you way too long, then pay attention. Based on my experience as a frustrated student and now as a teacher of reading strategies, I have some insights to share with you designed to make the reading process more productive, more interesting,... Even though it may seem like a solitary, isolated activity, when you read a scholarly work, you are participating in a conversation. Academic writers do not make up their arguments off the top of their heads (or solely from creative inspiration). Rather, they look at how others have approached similar issues and problems. Your job—and one for which you’ll get plenty of help from your professors and your peers—is to locate the writer and yourself in this larger conversation.

Reading academic texts is a deeply social activity; talking with your professors and peers about texts can not only help you understand your readings better, but it can push your thinking and clarify your... \( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \) \( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \) \( \newcommand{\dsum}{\displaystyle\sum\limits} \) \( \newcommand{\dint}{\displaystyle\int\limits} \) \( \newcommand{\dlim}{\displaystyle\lim\limits} \)

Karen Rosenberg S Reading Games Strategies For Reading Scholarly

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