Introduction

Practitioners entering scientific and technical fields are confronted with an ocean of information, and the tide will constantly rise. As a reader, you will struggle to stay current with the literature in order to maintain and advance your position in your field. It is a truism that the task of reading all the information published in leading journals, in all but the most narrowly defined specialties, is impossible. The problem for you as a reader will not be reading faster, but learning how to select what is worthwhile to read slowly. As a layperson reading in areas outside your field of expertise, you will confronted by a language not your own. The problem for you as a reader will not be to become an expert in dozens of fields, but to recognize the techniques for reading in your own field, and relate them to other fields. In this chapter we will examine strategies for how to read and critically assess scientific and technical literature, from the perspective of the practitioner and the layperson, in a timely manner.

The Possibilities of Reading

Our approaches to reading often vary widely, and for the most part remain unexamined. Typically, we understand reading as a passive, individual activity about which we receive no formal instruction after childhood. Implicitly, it seems, we develop our own reading strategies. You may prefer to read in a certain place under specific conditions. Pressed for time, you may only read the introduction, conclusion and subheadings to an article to be discussed in class that day. You may skip the words in a physics textbook altogether to get to the mathematical formulas. You may read a newspaper in a ritual manner, one section proceeding the next. While each these strategies are unique, academic disciplines encourage certain possibilities for reading by regulating the expression, production and presentation of a text. In part, how we read results from the activities going on "behind the scenes" of the words we read.

Behind the scenes of a text may lie the complex linguistic skills of a poet, or the complex research skills of researchers in a laboratory. In a poet's case, the activity of writing is generally private. Poets use imagination and personal insight in deciding what is true. However, consumers usually see the services of poets as minor. Reading poetry is associated with leisure. In a researcher's case, the activity of writing is public within their profession. Researchers use each other's work in deciding what is true or factual. Consumers see research as valuable. Reading science is associated with accomplishing a task. What we face, in part, when reading a poem or research article is the organizational structure that helps write the text. As readers we approach poetry, rightly or wrongly, as the product of a less formal, highly individual process, which makes poetry more accessible. Reading poetry, one does not have to contend with the technical apparatus, graphs, charts, references to instruments, jargon, and references to other work, found in scientific and technical writing. Scientific and technical writing is less accessible. Further, readers of scientific and technical writing await a unusual dilemma:

    The peculiarity of the scientific literature is now clear: the only three possible readings lead to the demise of the text. If you give up, the text does not count and might as well not have been written at all. If you go along, you believe it so much that it is quickly abstracted, abridged, stylized and sinks into tacit practice. Lastly, if you work through the author's trials, you quit the text and enter the laboratory. Thus the scientific text is chasing its readers away whether or not it is successful. Made for attack and defense, it is no more a place for a leisurely stay than a bastion or a bunker. This makes it quite different from the reading of the Bible, Stendhal or the poems of T.S. Eliot. (Bruno Latour, Science in Action,1987, p. 61).