I’d breeze through the introductionto get to the “meat” of the text. This was exactly the wrong thing todo.
I am guilty of this often, but doing this can leave you more confused and leave you without a lot of important context and information. Sometimes, just the introduction can tell you a whole lot about what you're going to read.
Just be prepared to face a wall of references that don’tmean a whole lot to you.
I'm already kind of use to this and it's comforting to know that the writer has sources for the things they're saying. Sometimes I will go through the references and read the source material that the author is pulling from, because it's interesting to see how they drew information out of the source.
Writers of scholarly sources, on the other hand,likely don’t think much about you at all when they sit down to write.Often, academics write primarily for other academics. But just becauseit’s people with PhDs writing for other people with PhDs doesn’t meanthat you should throw in the towel.
There's a lot of truth to this statement and it makes a lot of sense. Even though scholarly sources tend to not consider you when they write, there can still be a lot of value in what they're writing even though they're not catering to you.