Being Part of the Academic Community: Critical Reading Seminar

The way I see it, university is mainly about two things: reading and writing. Obviously this is an oversimplified view of what it means to be a student at University of Toronto, but one can hardly deny that outside of lectures and tutorials, the majority of student life is spent with either your nose in a book, or your fingers frantically typing away at an essay. I acknowledge that for some programs, essay writing isn’t a big component, but if you replace essays with problem sets or lab reports, the amount of writing that needs to be done for those are probably at par with writing essays.

picture of a computer screen in a class room in front of a projector screen projecting slides from a seminar

I mention this because last Friday, I attended a critical reading seminar at E.J. Pratt Library and so I thought, why not write about what I learned at the seminar. Earlier this year, I wrote a post about going to the Writing Plus workshop offered by the Writing Centre. I was surprised by what I took away from the workshop so I thought to myself, lets see what I can take away from a critical reading seminar. Much like the Writing Plus workshop, I really wasn’t expecting to walk away from the seminar with very much in the way of new insights, but unsurprisingly, there were significant nuggets of wisdom that I thankfully was able grasp!