Competency 8: Examine the relationship between text and context. Understand literary meanings in context and the use of critical reading strategies
Critical Reading Strategies
Here are seven critical reading strategies that you can learn readily and then apply to the reading selections in this class and your reading for other classes. Although mastering these strategies will not make the critical reading process easy, it can make reading much more satisfying and productive and thus help you handle difficult material well and with confidence.
Fundamental to each of these strategies is annotating directly on the page:
Underlining key words, phrases, or sentences.
Writing comments or questions in the margins.
Bracketing important sections of the text.
Constructing ideas with lines or arrows.
Numbering related points is a sequence.
Making a note of anything that strikes you as interesting, important, or questionable.
Previewing enables readers to get a sense of what the text is about and how it is organized before reading it closely. This simple strategy includes seeing what you can learn from the headnotes or other introductory material, skimming to get an overview of the content and organization, and identifying the rhetorical situation.
When you read a text, you read it through the lens of your own experience. Your understanding of the words on the page and their significance is informed by what you have come to know and value from living in a particular time and place. But the texts you read were all written in the past, sometimes in a radically different time and place. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between your contemporary values and those represented in the text.
As students, you are accustomed (I hope) to teachers asking questions about your reading. These questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more fully, and often this technique works. When you need to understand and use new information, though, it is most beneficial to write questions at any time. Still, in difficult academic readings, you will understand the material better and remember it longer if you write a question for every paragraph or a brief section. Each question should focus on the main idea, not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph.
The reading you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, unconscious beliefs, or positions on current issues. As you read a text for the first time, mark an X in the margin at each point where you feel a personal challenge to your attitudes, beliefs, or status. Make a brief note in the margin about what you feel or what created the challenge in the text. Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally challenged. What patterns do you see?
Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding the content and structure of a reading selection. Whereas outlining reveals the text's basic structure, summarizing synopsizes a selection’s main argument in brief. Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it may be done separately. The key to both outlining and summarizing can distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples. The main ideas form the backbone, which holds the various parts and pieces of the text together. Outlining the main ideas helps you to discover the structure.
All writers make assertions that they want you to accept as true. As a critical reader, you should not accept anything at face value, but you should recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully evaluated. An argument has two essential parts: a claim and support. The claim asserts a conclusion—an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of view—that the writer wants you to accept. The support includes reasons (shared beliefs, assumptions, and values) and evidence (facts, examples, statistics, and authorities) that give readers the basis for accepting the conclusion. When you assess an argument, you are concerned with the process of reasoning and truthfulness (these are not the same thing). At the most basic level, for an argument to be acceptable, the support must be appropriate to the claim, and the statements must be consistent with one another.
Many of the writers we will study are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to discuss them differently. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase understanding of why a writer approached a particular issue or question in the way he or she did.