My undergraduate general-education courses (History of Technology, Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, and so on) all like to assign “reading notes” as homework, which can substitute for a term paper (many undergraduates simply do not know how to write papers at all; if you force them to do so, plagiarism becomes all too likely, so it is better to be a bit more open-ended). But if reading notes are assigned as the major project, students should of course take them seriously; a slapdash job will naturally not earn a high grade.
If you send me your reading notes in advance, you can get some feedback. But I have found that, in fact, many students have the same weaknesses, so I might as well write a separate article to lay out my own criteria for judging reading-note assignments.
1. Basic Requirements
1. The writing flows smoothly
Of course, with any writing assignment, the most basic criterion is the writing itself. I do not expect students to display any great literary finesse; the minimum is simply that it reads smoothly. On this point, many students actually do rather poorly. For instance, I often see papers with no paragraph breaks, with some students writing one or two thousand characters straight through without a single break. Others are all over the place, with no logical progression at all, writing whatever comes to mind. On this matter, I do not have much else to say except to suggest that students read over what they have written after finishing it. You were all once the best high school students around; even if you are in the sciences or engineering, your Chinese language skills surely cannot be that bad. For example, in a college entrance exam essay, if you write 800 consecutive characters without paragraph breaks, does that sound reasonable? University assignments are not timed exams completed under pressure; one need not polish every phrase to perfection, but at the very least there should be enough time to smooth out the prose. So if your expression is even worse than in a college entrance exam essay, that is certainly unacceptable.
2. The choice of book is appropriate
My courses recommend many books for after-class reading, mainly Chinese-language works that are easy to obtain, but reading notes are not restricted to those, so which book or books you choose matters greatly. Of course, the books I recommend are at least all worth reading, but they may not all be especially suitable for use in reading notes.
For example, the book students most often choose is Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is an easy and very stimulating read; although controversial, it is not outdated, and is certainly worth reading. But in fact it is not really suitable as the object of a reading assignment. The reasons are as follows: A. The book has a grand scope and touches on many issues. It is very good for sparking inspiration, but reading notes often have difficulty staying focused and can only speak in generalities; B. The book is stimulating with respect to views of history, and it touches on technological issues as well, but it is not essentially a work related to the history of technology, so it is not easy for a reading note to fit the theme of the course; C. The book is popular and easy to read, so many students write on it, and teachers are tired of seeing it—how can you ensure that your writing brings something new? Books such as A Brief History of Humankind are similar: too broad in scope and too easy to read. They are good as general-education reading, but they are not easy to write well about as assignment material.
As a teacher, in general I am more inclined to encourage students who are willing to put in more effort. If you find that the book you chose can be finished very easily, and that it is also very easy to write down a few impressions about it, then chances are it will also be difficult to get a high grade. In an entire semester, if a course only asks you to read one or two books closely and write about them, then the choice of book should of course not be too opportunistic. For example, I have said before that something like Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change—a hefty volume of more than 700 pages, with a very focused theme—if you can muscle your way through a book like that, then even if it does not earn you credit, it at least earns you credit for effort. As long as the teacher can feel that you really did read it, the starting point for your grade will not be low.
Teachers also welcome students choosing books that the teacher has not recommended, especially foreign-language works. Of course, the standards for choosing then become even more exacting. If you pick a bad book and then praise it to the skies, naturally you will not get a high grade either.
3. Genuine reading
Even if you choose a good book, you still need to put in the work and read it carefully. Of course the teacher hopes to see that students have really read attentively, rather than merely flipping through a couple of pages and then searching for a few ready-made reviews to cobble together an assignment.
Of course, it is hard to see this at a glance, and there is always the possibility that a student might slip by undetected. But in general, teachers will also search for and browse existing reviews of the book, and if what you write after reading the book is just what others have already said—mere secondhand echoes—then whether you truly read it or not, your score will not be high. Generally speaking, there is a saying that there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand readers’ eyes; if you really did read deeply, every reader will have some individualized experience, and in many cases that can still be seen.
4. Independent thinking
The personalized experience mentioned above does not necessarily manifest itself as independent thinking. In fact, many students’ reading notes contain very little in the way of actual thought; they mainly summarize the chapter contents, restate the author’s views, and then give the work a verdict, and that is that. The personal element, at most, appears only in the way the summary is framed and in the final comments, but there is no deeper discussion.
So what kinds of thinking can a reading note show? There are many possibilities. For example, the most basic questions: Why did I want to read this book? What is good about this book? What did I learn from it? What are its shortcomings?
In particular, was there anything I did not understand or could not follow at first, but through thought, or more checking and verification, I finally understood? That can also be presented. Of course, it does not have to be written as a personal journey; it can be written more objectively, as an analysis of one part of the work, first posing a question and then answering it yourself.
In addition to resolving confusion, another common way of thinking is to establish connections. For example, do my professional knowledge, or my life experience, have any relation to the book and the course? Can they confirm one another, or can the reading process offer insight into other problems I face in life?
2. Advanced Requirements
The points above are the most basic requirements, or rather, roughly “high-school-student level” requirements—ones even a middle-school student attending the class could be expected to raise. But if one wants to go further and reach an excellent level, the above is still not enough. Students need to consciously complete a shift in identity, from middle school student to university student.
5. Agency
For middle school students and university students, the most fundamental difference is first of all a matter of learning attitude. High school is exam-oriented education; whether exam-oriented education is good or bad, an exam-oriented attitude is always right in high school. In middle school, learning itself is not the goal; learning is for the sake of dealing with exams and ultimately getting into a good university. When there is a clearly defined “external motivation,” the “internal motivation” for learning is not so important. But once you enter university, even if you are still reading for some external motivation, there is no longer only one standard path.
Why am I reading? In high school, this question may not need to be asked so much, but in university one should have a clear understanding of it at every moment. Especially in an elective course, where one freely chooses a certain book to read. Starting with course selection, everything is free; choosing the book is even freer. So a university student should autonomously decide: Why am I reading this book?
Once you have this sense of “agency,” it will be reflected in the style of the assignment. Many students’ work is obviously just “to account to the teacher.” Weaker students are simply “getting by” or “slipping it through,” while slightly better students are “showing off their effort,” and you can feel the student trying hard to tell the teacher: “Hey, I did read the book—look, did I read it carefully enough?”
But in my view, the one who really needs an “account” is the student himself or herself. Autonomous learning is for one’s own sake, so the more important question is: “I did not read this book in vain.”
What insights did I gain from reading this book? What prejudices did it correct? What knowledge did it broaden? These are the questions that are more worth paying attention to.
Likewise, a university teacher is not a teacher under exam-oriented education; he does not care whether the students he teaches get higher scores than others, and so on. Of course, the teacher also does not need to hear students repeatedly recite the “general idea of each paragraph” of some book. The teacher is not fixated on assessing the student’s reading ability and diligence. As a teacher of a general-education course, if students can use the opportunity provided by the course to read books that benefit them, opening up their horizons and broadening their thinking, that is what is most rewarding.
6. A dialogic consciousness
High school teaching is spoon-feeding; students are not expected to question the conclusions of the textbook, they just memorize and apply them. But once we enter university, we should shift to a new teaching model. So-called research-based learning, critical learning—in short, the duty of a university teacher is not to provide ready-made conclusions that cannot be criticized, and the duty of a university student is not merely to passively receive the transmission of knowledge.
In the assignment, this appears as what is called “problem awareness” and “dialogic awareness.”
For a reading note, of course, problem awareness is also necessary, but it is not as important as it is in a paper; what is even more crucial is to have a “dialogic consciousness.”
As I said earlier, writing an assignment is not just about getting by, not just about proving that I worked hard. Reading itself is a dialogic activity—dialogue with the author.
Sometimes, when I suggest that students write reading notes, I tell them they can use “you” to refer to the author (though in the final version it is best to change it back to the author’s name). “You said this and that, which really inspired me, but I think it could also be this or that; just as you said before, I also think this and that, and following your line of thought, I came to think of this and that…”
At the same time that the author is treated as “you,” the “I” of the reader also comes into view. Many people’s reading notes contain neither author nor reader; the “subject” they use is “Chapter One,” “Chapter Two,” and so on. They do not treat the author as a subject with a unique personality, and still less do they bring themselves into view.
Beyond dialoguing with the author, one can also dialogue with the teacher. When I was a student, I basically wrote course assignments with a mentality of “sparring” with the instructor. Of course, first of all the teacher definitely gave me many insights and a great deal of knowledge. But the teacher is certainly not omniscient; there are always omissions or places that are not fully developed. Then I can use the assignment to offer the teacher supplements or corrections.
Of course, dialogue with the teacher is often hidden; the teacher seems to be merely an audience to my dialogue with the author. Although my dialogue with the author does not directly target the teacher, many of these dialogues actually involve this third-party “he” participating in them—you say something that happens to support him; something he said happens to help me understand this passage of yours; on this point he did not say enough, while you go deeper; what you say is good, but I remember he had a different formulation…
7. Comparative awareness
The dialogic awareness discussed above already implies a certain kind of “comparison.” For example, regarding the same issue, what does the teacher say, what does the author say, and what do I think? Between these three—yours, mine, and his—a process of “comparison” unfolds. If the parties differ in some way, then why are there differences, and who, in the end, is saying it better? That is the kind of question worth digging into more deeply.
In addition to this, an excellent reading note is often not just about one book; when discussing a particular book, it also needs to draw on a wide range of sources and cite other books or materials.
Many students simply write a string of chapter summaries, summarize what the author said, and then end with a sentence like “the author writes well,” and that is that. But the question is, on what grounds do you say the author writes well? And what does a badly written book look like? Comparison must be brought in before one can really explain “what is good about it”; otherwise it is nothing more than an empty compliment.
Comparisons between the author and the teacher, between the author and common sense, between the author and other authors, between the first half of the book and the second half, and so on—all of these can be mined in depth.
8.Research-mindedness
To be able, in a reading note, to bring out the various “comparisons” mentioned above is already a good thing. But if you want to go one step further and, among those comparisons, give your own judgment and put forward a conclusive or illuminating point, then you need to do further research: what is the basis for what Zhang San says? What reason does Li Si have for saying that? Where exactly do their core disagreements lie?
Academic works, or relatively rigorous popular works, all come with citations and notes. We can follow the trail and probe further into the resources on which the author relied. Or we can search again according to relevant keywords and see what other scholars have said about the issues in question, and how other scholars have evaluated the author. After synthesizing more material, and adding my own independent thinking, I can then have the confidence to make some judgments—for and against in these comparisons, which side am I on? Or I can propose a comprehensive, compatible explanation, or I can put forward a fresh new line of thought.
By this point, for a course assignment, this is of course already beyond the syllabus and has entered the realm of academic research. But the very best course assignments can, of course, be treated directly as academic texts.
These requirements are basically progressive, step by step, and the more of them you meet, the higher your score will be. Of course, grading is, overall, still a very subjective matter; I hope students can face grades with a more easygoing attitude. But meeting the requirements above is not just about getting a good grade. More crucially, it is also about allowing yourself to gain more. The ideal grading outcome is for me to give the highest score to those students who care least about high scores, because they have already gained the most from the reading process.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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