Deciphering Academic Writing
In her comic, Christina represents her sense of “confusion” at the writing she encounters in an academic journal. In representing the writing as Chinese characters, she is emphasizing how foreign this type of writing is to her.
As you can see in her comic, Christina is viewing the academic journal article on her computer. In reality, students need to become even more intimate with the texts; this typically includes writing notes, or “annotating” the text either by making notes on the computer in the “margins” or by printing out the journal article and writing on the paper version of the text.
This involves finding important ideas from many different texts and putting them together to create a coherent whole. This is called “synthesis.” In Qinglan Li’s comic, the extreme difficulty of understanding academic writing is made clear. The closeup of the academic writing has been annotated in red, yellow, and blue; she shows us that she has repeatedly tried to find what is important in the academic text. And yet, she is still not able to “understand” what the words mean. Moreover, Qinglan recognizes that she can’t “paraphrase” what she can’t understand.
