How Do You Get By In College English Classes Without Actually Reading The Books?
Don’t want to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in middle English? Or maybe you simply don’t have the time in your very busy life to keep up with all that reading that’s assigned to you. Here’s a list of tips – both what to do and what not to do – that will help you get by without doing much more than a fraction of the actual assigned reading. Go to class and listen carefully. Since you haven’t done the reading it may be hard to follow along sometimes, but if you listen to points your classmate and professor make about assignments, it will help you drastically when it comes to writing papers. Take some notes in class. Jot down page numbers of passages the professor deems to be important. Remember, college English papers are about making arguments about the content or analyzing the text – not writing summaries. When you go to write papers, refer to these short passages, ask yourself: Based upon these little pieces of texts, and class discussions, what observations or arguments can I make?
