I am\u00a0a first-generation university graduate. Having said that, although my parents never went to college, they provided me\u00a0with\u00a0many socio-economic advantages and encouraged me to work out ‘how’ to succeed. I did\u00a0my PhD at Warwick University following\u00a0a BA in Fine Art and a Masters in Electronic Media.\u00a0\u00a0In 1990, when I began my PhD research, I was a visual artist with a part-time teaching job at a local Further Education \/ community college.<\/p>\n
I am\u00a0a visual thinker, an avid reader and\u00a0an anxious writer. My mother, Joan, an extremely well-read autodidact, started me reading early. From a young age I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. At breakfast I compulsively read cereal packets, classified ads, motoring magasines and the newspaper. Starting from when I was a small kid, reading under the bedclothes with a torch, I read myself to sleep for an hour each night. \u00a0Back then, I secretly raided Mum’s bookshelves aged 10 onwards, reading “The Joy of Sex”, to everything written by James Baldwin, from then-baffling books by Henry Miller to the classics, and I returned, again and again, to the Liverpool poets. You can read more about my family and their influences on my life and my art website, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n When I was\u00a0fourteen Mum signed me up for\u00a0an advanced reading and study course. I learned to speed read, how best to mark up texts, how to\u00a0make notes to help me revise and summarise texts. It was a blessing and a curse. To this day I struggle to ‘switch off’ my speed reading which is premised\u00a0on reading a text at least three times. This is no problem when reading papers and academic texts \u00a0as this is what most of us do, read repeatedly. However,\u00a0it’s a curse when I fly through novels, my habitual bedtime\u00a0reading, but apparently retain almost nothing afterwards and I don’t want to re-read them 3 or 4 times. Having said that,\u00a0\u00a0if I pick the novel\u00a0up again, even years later, and start reading, the whole story\u00a0comes back. Nowadays, I love my e-reader because I can store hundreds of texts and speed read chapters and articles multiple times, highlighting sections for quick reference using those study skills from so long ago.<\/p>\n Despite my love of\u00a0reading, my writing skills were weak when I went into my PhD and I still have to work hard to write an acceptable academic paper, such as these<\/a>\u00a0I’ve posted to Academia.edu. My inspirational PhD supervisor,\u00a0David Jenkins<\/a>,\u00a0taught me to research and he honed my reading skills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am\u00a0a first-generation university graduate. Having said that, although my parents never went to college, they provided me\u00a0with\u00a0many socio-economic advantages and encouraged me to work out ‘how’ to succeed. I did\u00a0my PhD at Warwick University following\u00a0a BA in Fine Art and a Masters in Electronic Media.\u00a0\u00a0In 1990, when I began my PhD research, I was … Continue reading My PhD experience: reading and writing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":626,"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neuro-memento-mori.com\/teaching\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}