Every semester has its hidden essentials. Food keeps you going, sleep keeps you steady — and reading quietly carries the whole thing forward. You can skip a meal or pull a short night, but when you stop reading, the semester begins to unravel. Most of us move through thousands of pages each semester. And yet, for all its importance, reading is often the thing students feel least confident about — for a simple reason: It is rarely taught. Beneath the act of turning pages lies a deeper question I want to explore in this second “Basics” column: Am I truly understanding what I’m reading, and am I taking notes that will serve me later? In other words, how do we transform reading from a burden into one of the most powerful tools we have for learning, and for life?
That question came up just last week. One of my students wrote to me with a concern that many others have quietly carried: “As I have been going through the readings, I have been taking detailed notes. … I think I might be taking a little too long to complete each reading considering their relatively short length, so I would appreciate any recommendations you have.” I admired the honesty, especially since this student has shown a remarkable work ethic. But beneath the email lay a deeper uncertainty that everyone, at some point, has faced: How do you read in a way that is careful without being endless? On campus, where nearly every class rests on texts — articles, chapters, cases, data — the ability to read well is not a side skill. It is the foundation on which almost everything else depends.
Too often, we treat reading like a conveyor belt: move the eyes across the lines, extract the facts, deposit them into notes. But reading is not about consumption — it is about conversation. Think about reading as a hike on the Ithaca Falls Trail. Some stretches are smooth and quick, others are (very) steep and slow and sometimes you stop altogether to take in the gorgeous view. Different texts, like different trails, ask for different rhythms. A text is not a container of information to be emptied, but a voice to be heard — sometimes argued with, sometimes puzzled over, sometimes quietly set aside. Notes, then, are not proof that you did the work. They are traces of a dialogue, reminders of what startled you, what you questioned, what you want to return to.
The challenge, of course, is that not every line (and every text you’ll ever read) deserves equal weight. A vivid example or striking phrase might stay with you, but most texts are built around just a few central moves: the main claim, the key evidence, the moments where the author shifts direction, builds on prior work or reframes the debate. Learning to spot those pivots is far more useful than underlining every sentence. Otherwise, reading stretches endlessly, and notes swell with detail but yield little clarity. The real skill lies in focusing on the few things that matter most. In my own work, I’ve found four simple principles that make this easier.
1. Build a Mental Map. Begin by previewing the text and its author(s) — glance at the title, introduction, conclusion, even the first and last paragraphs or section headings if they’re there. Then ask yourself: What question is this reading trying to answer? That small act of orientation gives you a map. As you read, you’re no longer wandering through paragraphs blindly but listening for how the author moves toward an answer. Your notes can be as simple as a sentence or two at each stop: “Here’s the claim. Here’s the evidence. Here’s where it shifts.”
2. Keep Track of Your Journey. Read in small chunks, and pause. After a few pages, stop and ask yourself: What is this section trying to do? What surprised me? What one question do I still have? Note your own discoveries and confusions. Writing down even a single question — to the author, to the argument or to the section as a whole — often helps more than copying ten sentences. Questions keep the text alive; they turn your notes into an ongoing conversation rather than a static record.
3. Compress, and Compress More. Notes are not transcripts. Copying line after line may feel safe — we’ve all done it — but it leaves you no closer to understanding. Instead, practice compression. Summarize a paragraph in your own words, capture a key phrase, or jot a quick connection to something else you’ve read in class or elsewhere. The act of rephrasing forces your brain to do the harder — and more lasting — work of making sense of the material.
4. Revisit Later. Don’t let your notes die on the page. Come back to them a day later, or even a week later, and see if you can recall the main points without looking. As I write these words, I just returned to notes I took this summer — and they feel sharper now than when I first scribbled them down. This simple habit of spaced review does more for long-term memory than any amount of late-night cramming. In that moment, your notes are a gift to your future self — a way of making sure the work you did once will still be there when you need it most.
So much of learning is not about speed or quantity, but about shaping a relationship with the words in front of you. Reading is one of those hidden essentials of each semester: invisible when it’s working, unsettling when it frays. And like any essential, it is always a work in progress. Nobody gets it perfectly right, not even after years or decades. I’ve read countless words and worked my way through thousands of books in my career — some beautifully crafted, others clumsy or dense — and I still stumble, get stuck, take breaks and wonder if I have understood enough. That is not failure; it is part of the journey we have all embarked on. The goal is not perfect notes or flawless recall, but a practice that helps you listen, question and carry ideas forward with others. This week, as we head toward the final stretch before fall break, try one small shift: Pause after a few pages, turn a margin note into a question or review yesterday’s notes before class. Notice how even a small change can reshape the conversation you have with the text — and, ultimately, with yourself.
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Jan Burzlaff is an Opinion Columnist and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Jewish Studies. Office Hours (Open Door Edition) is his weekly dispatch to the Cornell community — a professor’s reflections on teaching, learning and the small moments that make a campus feel human. Readers can submit thoughts and questions anonymously through the Tip Sheet here. He can also be reached at profjburzlaff@cornellsun.com.
