In taking a graduate/advanced undergraduate seminar on critical thinking and humanistic music study, you will be reading lots of scholarly articles/chapters through the semester: professional literature in the humanities that may be significantly harder to understand than the textbook or other readings you might be used to. That is in fact part of the joy and challenge of this task. It's worthwhile to read slowly, look up new words, and mentally summarize as you go to make sure you are understanding the research and argument.

I recommend annotating the document (or taking notes in a separate document) as you read. Annotation practice is personal, but usually includes highlighting, underlining, flagging main points, and noting any new vocabulary or concepts. You should add your own thoughts and questions to the text.

Note that engaging with a scholarly source for a class like this is seldom about memorizing facts or merely summarizing the author’s argument beat by beat (though you may sometimes be interested in doing that). Instead, you will “filter” the article down to just the most essential parts: its argument and its methodology. You should first try to identify and understand the author’s thesis (or argument or purpose for writing) and then go on to evaluate how and how well that argument is substantiated.

Some ideas of questions you might address include: What new insights does the article give us? What does it neglect or leave out? What types of evidence does the author rely on to make the argument? What is the most and least persuasive aspect of the work?

When you come to class, you must be prepared to share what you learned, over and above what you may have written in Discussion Forums. Again this will seldom be about restating the author's argument (the "content") but will prioritize your own interpretation and analysis of the article.

Very important note: You must not use AI to summarize the article for you, or to generate the ideas or prose for your Discussion Forums, projects, or in-class conversation. The point is to demonstrate your own ability to read, understand, and extrapolate from the text yourself.