Lowkey Hugo

My students often tell me they spent a whole afternoon on a single paper and still could not say what it was about. The problem is almost never intelligence. It is reading a paper like a novel, from the first word to the last.

You do not read a paper. You interrogate it.

Here is the three-pass method I teach in my first lecture of every year.

Pass one: five minutes

Read only these parts:

1. The title and the abstract.
2. The introduction’s last paragraph, where the authors list their contributions.
3. Every figure and table, with its caption.
4. The conclusion.

Now decide: is this paper relevant to what I am doing? Most of the time the honest answer is no, and you have saved yourself an afternoon.

Pass two: one hour

Read the whole paper, but skip the proofs and the detailed derivations. Mark every term you do not know and every claim that surprises you. At the end, try to summarise the paper in three sentences to someone who has not read it.

Pass three: as long as it takes

Only for papers you want to build on. Try to recreate the work in your head, or better, in code. Ask what would happen if one assumption changed. This is where real understanding comes from, and also where you start finding the gaps that become your own research.

Keep a reading log

For every paper, I write four lines in my plain-text notebook:

Six months later, those four lines are worth more than the highlights in any PDF.