Reading through academic texts for an assignment is something that’s always been very difficult for me. Part of the problem is that they can be very dense and hard to understand, the other part is that I have ADHD and trying to focus on reading something that can sometimes reach thirty pages long, and is full of information I barely understand, tends to make it a difficult task of even mustering to motivation to look at it.
Academic texts, especially as a WRD major, is something that’s about as common as goose poop in the park. And like goose poop in the park, I’ve learned to accept it as an inevitable part of life. My mind has a tendency to drift off and think about other things, flicking through different topics like I it’s a TV. One moment I’m thinking about how different genres and discourses in our lives create a multifaceted identity for us, and the next I’m thinking about a song I heard playing on some guy’s headphones while on the train, then I’m thinking about whether or not I had an assignment due last night, and then it’s something like what’s for lunch, and before I know it the reading is an after-afterthought.
At first it was an absolute pain to try and read through any of the articles I was assigned, but as time went on, I slowly learned that challenging myself to try and get through the reading could be kind of fun. It’s not often, but when I do catch my mind drifting away I feel pretty proud of myself and that good feeling is something that I’d use to motivate myself to try and feel again. So whenever it came time to focus and read an assigned text, I’d try to go for as long as I could with reading as much of the text as possible, which was maybe a few minutes, and then attempt to stop myself from losing track. This was something that has taken quite a bit of practice but after a few years of doing this, I think it’s my best tactic for coping with the academic version of goose poop.
