The majority of Douglas Hunter’s article on “book breaking” was about how one should process a piece of writing, specifically an academic piece of work. The rest of the work was about how he thinks the process for writing an academic article should be changed, specifically so that it is easier to read and more accessible to the general population.
Most of the information presented in the article by Hunter was not actually new to me. Thanks to the IB program offered at my high school, I have had a good amount of experience with research and “book breaking,” as Hunter refers to it. For IB, I was required to write an “extended essay” which involved research on any topic of our choosing, followed by writing a 4000 word paper with information we gained from our research. Additionally, all IB classes required an “internal assessment,” which, depending on the class it was for, was also a research paper consisting of roughly 2000 words. I used the process Hunter describes as book breaking without even being aware that that was what I was doing – it was just the intuitive process I figured out while trying to glean the most relevant information from the various books and articles I sifted through.
In regards to the second half of the article, I don’t actually believe the academic process should change in order to be more accessible. This may be a somewhat controversial opinion, but I believe changing the process and organization of academic writing would result in them being “dumbed down.” I also believe that one should really want to do research when reading or “breaking” an academic piece of writing, because it makes the process feel worth while and less cumbersome. Although I haven’t quite experienced the rigor of Hunter’s PhD program, I feel that sifting through academic writing is just part of the process, and that academia wouldn’t be the same without having to go through the book breaking process he describes.