Insight into academic writing

I was interested in both the dicussions by Peter, Ruth and Sam and their ideas about ways of accessing academic writing. When I first read a piece of text, I'm somewhat baffled as the words don't always resonate with me and I start to question my understanding. So I felt a sense of relief when Peter said it was ok to feel like that. I also liked the way he linked his thinking of art alongside his writing in particular the actual process. I listened carefully to ideas about how to read academic text. Suggestions included read the text in layers, don't try to understand it, don't read it word for word, just scan. I liked the analogy of the butterfly, allow yourself to flit from one place to another, just allow your eyes to rest in certain places, absorb then move on. That made me feel a lot better! Through discussion, we were given an insight into ways of accessing and viewing academic text. For example, with reference to a paragraph, I learnt that the first line begins with the point, then it goes on to the explanation, the evidence and then the comment. Another area of questioning was when you see a word, what does it mean?- question what you see. Think of it as spending time reading what it means rather than understand it? I then thought isn't that the same thing - understanding and meaning? Apparently not as google says : meaning is the symbolic value of something while understanding is mental, sometimes emotional process of comprehension, assimilation of knowledge, which is subjective by its nature. Another interesting point was not to go straight into detailed reading i.e. reading word after word - don't get sucked into the glue of the text whereby you feel you can't move forwards because you don't understand. This was helpful because this is how I sometimes feel and as a result I switch off. Discussion progressed as Ruth and Sam talked about what makes a text academic and it was suggested that the SQ3R technique may help develop this thinking process. I will endeavour to reflect on the diagram as I hope this will help me get a sense of structure. With this in mind, I'm off now to have a rummage through some text!