This guide is intended to show you how to read and understand scholarly articles, which can help you keep up with assigned read ings. And, appreciating how academics write and why they write as they do, may even improve your own papers.
All writing follows conventions.
Cookbooks, letters, novels, lists, and dictionaries all depend on a specific kind of language and presentation to be comprehensible and easy to use. You can open any book with a plain cover, glance at the pages and, in most cases, know imme diately what kind of book it is. We can read these conventional forms effortlessly. With practice, reading academic articles and essays can become as straightforward. Academic disciplines, too, have conventional forms that their authors must use if other scholars are to understand what they are saying.