# Strategies & tools for productive reading and writing


Dominik Lukeš gives first-year students at Opportunity Oxford a morning session on productive reading and writing; the following session covers AI. Academic reading has a purpose, so it is strategic and cumulative: the reader's job is to identify, summarise and debate arguments. Writing is the core of academic practice, and he quotes Thomas Basbøll that scholars write to open their ideas to the criticism of their peers. Both improve with practice.

## You'll come away with

- How to read strategically: read, skim and scan, how to skim, how to bootstrap from reference lists, and why not to go into a reading cold.
- A consistent system for notes, with a warning against keeping all of them in Word, and what Zotero does for readings.
- Habits for writing: write for your peers, Helen Sword's BASE model, deliberate practice, an eight-week writing boot-up and writing with others.
- Two working rules: back up every statement, and always have an outline.


[Watch video](/media/2026-09-10/reading-and-writing-2026-09-10-summary-web.mp4) · [Captions](/media/2026-09-10/captions.vtt)

0:02 Productive reading and writing
0:50 A stack of readings, linked
1:39 Read strategically
2:31 Skimming wastes less time
3:19 Flashcards for unfamiliar words
4:06 Five minutes to five years
4:56 Writing is the core of academic practice
5:50 Deliberate practice
6:43 Writing reveals gaps

Narration uses a synthetic voice. This video is an AI-assisted summary of the recorded lecture.


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