Academic reading skills

Scanning, Skimming, Surveying, Using the title

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Scanning

When you look for a telephone number or a name in an index, your eyes move quickly over the words until you find the particular information you are looking for. You ignore everything except the specific information you want. Scanning is directed and purposeful and should be extremely fast.

Short quiz

Short quiz: Scanning

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Speaking in Public: What Women Say about Working in the Video Game Industry

Abstract

Since the 1990s, conversations about the dearth of women working in the video game industry have centred on three topics: (1) ways to draw more women into the field, (2) the experiences of women working in the industry, and (3) the experiences of those who once worked in the industry but left. Although there has been considerable research on the conditions and occupational identities of video game developers, less scholarly attention has been devoted to women in games work, the barriers/obstacles and challenges/opportunities they face, and how they talk about their experiences. This article offers a feminist approach that demonstrates how discourse focused on affect can be reread as intimately related to silences about power and how the rhetorical constraints that public speech imposes upon what can be said about “women in games” aid us in understanding what might remain unspoken, and why.

When were the conversations about the dearth of women working in the video game industry started?

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Speaking in Public: What Women Say about Working in the Video Game Industry

Abstract

2. What are the topics of these conversations?

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Speaking in Public: What Women Say about Working in the Video Game Industry

Abstract

3. What are the areas that are less focused by scholars?

Skimming

Skimming is useful when you want to survey a text to get a general idea of what it is about. In skimming you ignore the details and look for the main ideas. Main ideas are usually found in the first sentences of each paragraph and in the first and last paragraphs. It is also useful to pay attention to the organization of the text.

As reading is an interactive process, you have to work at constructing the meaning of the text from the marks on the paper. You need to be active all the time when you are reading. It is useful, therefore, if you need to read the text in detail, before you start reading to activate the knowledge you have about the topic of the text and to formulate questions based on this information. Skimming a text for gist can help you formulate questions to keep you interacting with the text. There are several ways to skim a text.

Using first lines of paragraphs

In most academic writing, the paragraph is a coherent unit, about one topic, connected to the previous and next paragraphs. Paragraphs are organized internally, and the first sentence of each paragraph is often a summary of, or an introduction to, the paragraph. You can therefore get a good idea of the overall content of a text by reading the first sentence of each paragraph. This should help you get a feeling for the structure of the text. In many cases that will be enough, but if it isn't, you will now have a good idea of the structure of the text and you will find it easier to read in detail. Familiar texts are easier to read.

As reading is an interactive process, you have to work at constructing the meaning of the text from the marks on the paper. You need to be active all the time when you are reading. It is useful, therefore, if you need to read the text in detail, before you start reading to activate the knowledge you have about the topic of the text and to formulate questions based on this information. Skimming a text using first lines of paragraphs can help you formulate questions to keep you interacting with the text.

Using first and last paragraphs

In most academic writing, the text is organized clearly with an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction gives you an idea of what the text is going to be about and the conclusion shows that this is what it has been about. You can therefore get a good idea of the overall content of a text by reading the first and last paragraphs of a text. This should help you get a feeling for the content of the text. In many cases that will be enough, but if it isn't, you will now have a good idea of the content of the text and you will find it easier to read in detail. Familiar texts are easier to read.

As reading is an interactive process, you have to work at constructing the meaning of the text from the marks on the paper. You need to be active all the time when you are reading. It is useful, therefore, if you need to read the text in detail, before you start reading to activate the knowledge you have about the topic of the text and to formulate questions based on this information. Skimming a text using first and last paragraphs can help you formulate questions to keep you interacting with the text.

Using section headings

In some academic writing, the text is organized through the use of headings and sub-headings. You can therefore get a good idea of the overall content of a text by reading the headings and sub-headings first. This should help you get a feeling for the content and organization of the text. In many cases that will be enough, but if it isn't, you will now have a good idea of the content of the text and you will find it easier to read in detail. Familiar texts are easier to read.

As reading is an interactive process, you have to work at constructing the meaning of the text from the marks on the paper. You need to be active all the time when you are reading. It is useful, therefore, before you start reading to activate the knowledge you have about the topic of the text and to formulate questions based on this information. The title, sub-titles and section headings can help you formulate questions to keep you interacting with the text.

Short Quiz

Short quiz: Skimming

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Background

Since the 1990s, there has been increasing alarm expressed about the dearth of women working in the video games industry, increasing interest in ways to attract more women to the field and increasing concern about the experiences of women employed in the industry, if less often about the motivation of those who have left it. Our study focuses on what women working in the games industry can tell us about these questions and concerns. Its methodological aspiration is feminist, and this means, at minimum, that the ways we collect and analyse our data should be ethical and respectful and enhance rather than exploit women’s resources. Generally, time is our most important resource. This is particularly true for women as their time is often devalued when compared with that of men (Freysinger et al. 2013, 13–14). Moreover, women typically do not have as much control over how their time is spent. So, in laying the foundations for this study, instead of surveying and interviewing prospective informants, we wanted to see who among this group of women has already invested her time and energy to tell a public story, whether in a blog post, a book chapter, a televised talk, a radio interview, or other public medium—and to build the foundations of our study by focusing on that subgroup of women in games.

We found that their public speech predominantly advances positive accounts of women’s involvement in the games industry, and this “insider” perspective stands in contrast to research-based accounts that have foregrounded masculinized and often hostile working conditions across the industry (Consalvo 2008; Harvey and Fisher 2013, 2015). There is indeed a tension here: because efforts to repudiate the burden of gender and to claim an equal right to speak about their work, and not about their sex, compel women in games to perform the additional affective labour of justifying their role and influence as workers who “fit in,” a rhetorical stance which simultaneously prohibits them from critiquing misogynistic working conditions endemic to the industry. Integral to that paradoxical discursive work is a peculiar burden of compulsory speech.

Results and Next Steps?

Coming to terms with what we see from this initial and exploratory study of what women in games have said “in public” about their working conditions and experiences, conclusions must be correspondingly tentative and provisional. Even so, at a time when self-presentation, self-expression, self-branding, and self-marketing are the order of the day, what is striking is who speaks in public and how, and who does not speak, and why. The short answer is, it is painful and dangerous. Of the 190 women whose “public voices” we sought out, for ninety-six (51%), we could find no such public statements. Looking for a relationship between seniority/precarity and voice/silence, we found fifteen years average games industry experience for women who commented versus twelve years for those who did not. A preliminary analysis of job type and experience suggests that this is a sample of the most accomplished and successful women in games, who have mastered a specialized discourse, a “professional language” with its own distinguishing idioms and rhetoric. Making meaning of this specialist discourse means listening for what is not said, seeing how silences are structured through, to borrow from Habermas (1970), the “systematic distortions” of communication identifiable in these samples of public speech. Identifying key lexical terms and discursive tactics, distinguishing “negative” from “positive” utterances and excavating from linguistic literalness a deeper sense of its strategic deployment, it becomes clear that women in games are far from feeling any “permission to speak freely,” both uses and meanings of their linguistic utterances being indirect, suggestive, and very, very careful. When women are one-tenth of a workforce, and that work-force has a long tradition of exclusion, marginalization, and hostility toward women, it is little wonder. As Rosalind Gill (2014, 511) has remarked, it is through such discourses and practices of power that “gender inequality has become if not unspeakable, then extremely difficult to voice.”

(Text retrieved from: de Castell, S. & Skardzius, K. (2019). Speaking in Public: What Women Say about Working in the Video Game Industry. Television & New Media, 20(8), 836–847.)

After reading the first and final paragraph of a research article, can you get a general idea about the meaning of the essay?

Using the title

Reading is an interactive process - it is two-way. This means you have to work at constructing the meaning from the marks on the paper. You need to be active all the time when you are reading. It is useful, therefore, before you start reading to try to actively remember what you know, and do not know, about the subject and then formulate questions based on the information you have. You can then read to answer these questions.

Title, sub-titles and section heading can help you formulate questions to keep you interacting.

The title is a summary of the text. Sometimes we have to make quick decisions based on only the title. Therefore it is useful to try to understand it well. This may mean looking up unfamiliar words in a dictionary.

It is a good idea to ask yourself the following questions, based on the title:

Is this text relevant to your needs? Is it related to the subject you are studying?
What do you expect to learn from the text? Ask yourself some questions that you expect the text to answer.

Surveying the text

Most of the time you will be reading serious academic texts books, journal articles and other academic texts. And often you will need to read your texts closely and carefully in order to understand specific information. However, you cannot read every word in every book in the library. It is useful therefore to learn reading techniques to help you quickly assess new material, decide if it is useful and which parts need to be read more carefully. It is also much easier to read the texts in detail when you have a rough idea of what a text is about - roughly what the author's purpose is, what is at the beginning of the text and what is at the end.

Reference: http://www.uefap.com/reading/readframeff.htm