Friday, May 17, 2013

Three rules to distinguish a worthy document from others

We read a lot of documents every day. There are many documents which are worth to read deeply. However, a lot of documents are less useful.
We have no much time to read all documents we saw. Therefore we should distinguish worthy documents from others.

In general, we select reports or other manuscripts with the title first. An interesting title fascinate us. But, some documents are difficult to evaluate only with the title, especially academic documents. And, every author is much concerned about the title to make you read the document. We often experience a book with an aggressive title has been revealed to be empty in the content.

Actually, I think the title is not available to examine the content of the documents. So, what should we pay attention to?

There is no golden principle, though my standard is the three rules below;

(1) Read the document randomly through a several pages.

If you think the contents are evidently incorrect, it is useless.
If you know almost all of the contents, it is useless too.
If you do not know the content well, it is possible to be worthy for you.
If you do not know the content at all, it may be worthy, but not for you, unfortunately.
The point is that you should read randomly first. A good document is written for you can understand from wherever you start to read at.

(2) Read the reference part of the document.

If the document does not refer to anything, it is less worthy. Of course, the poems are exceptional.
If the document refers to some famous persons, you should judge the quality.
I think internet documents refer to only some Tweets are not worthy, especially they are media reports, for it is not difficult to gain some comments from the Tweeter.
In academic documents, both the quality and the quantity are good standards of the value.

(3) Read the last paragraph of the document.

There are two types of the documents. Some describe the conclusion. Others not.
The is no difference between the two. The choice is yours. If you need some conclusion about the issue the document describes about, you should pick one.

So, I recommend  you to read for a minute only first. That's all.

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