These are brief notes of guidance. We will discuss setting up and analysing a Reading Diary in seminars. The idea is to compile a full record of everything you read (from journal articles to newspapers, from e-mails to Middlemarch) so that you can build up a picture of yourself as a reader, the time it takes you to read different types of material, and the circumstances in which you do different kinds of reading. This will become your own data-bank for comparing your experience with that of readers in the past. You may come to use your notes as a means of reflecting on how you were taught (and are still being taught) to read.

 

 

A small notebook that you can carry around is probably the best way of keeping the Diary, though you will probably want to type up your records from time to time, as you work out how much of your time you spend reading different kinds of material, and how you operate as a reader with different kinds of text.