Critical Reading: Interrogating Texts Since you rarely have the luxury of successive re-readings of material, either, given the pace of life in and out of the classroom, you need to spend your time reading in a wise manner. To achieve mastery of level three comprehension practicing critical reading is necessary. Critical reading – active engagement and interaction with texts – is essential to your academic success, and to your intellectual growth. After all, research has shown that students who read deliberately retain more information and retain it longer. While the strategies described below are (for the sake of clarity) listed sequentially, you typically do most of them simultaneously. They may feel awkward at first, and you may have to deploy them very consciously the first few times, especially if you are not used to doing anything more than moving your eyes across the page. But they will quickly become habits, and you will notice the difference—in what you “see” in a reading, and in the confidence with which you approach your texts. 1. Preview: Look “around” the text before you start reading. Previewing enables you to develop a set of expectations about the scope and aim of the text. These very preliminary impressions offer you a way to focus your reading. 2. Annotate: Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a “dialogue” with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text. It’s also a way to have an ongoing conversation with yourself as you move through the text and to record what that encounter was like for you. Note: While highlighting can seem like an active reading strategy, it can actually distract from the business of learning and dilute your comprehension – a pen or pencil is better! 3. Outline, Summarize, and Analyze: Take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together again in language that is meaningful to you. a) Outlining enables you to see the skeleton of an argument: the thesis, the first point and evidence (and so on), through the conclusion. With weighty or difficult readings, that skeleton may not be obvious until you go looking for it. b) Summarizing accomplishes something similar, but in sentence and paragraph form, and with the connections between ideas made explicit. c) Analyzing adds an evaluative component to the summarizing process—it requires you not just to restate main ideas, but also to test the logic, credibility, and emotional impact of an argument. In analyzing a text, you reflect upon and decide how effectively (or poorly) its argument has been made. 4. Look for Repetitions and Patterns: The way language is chosen, used, positioned in a text can be important indication of what an author considers crucial and what he expects you to glean from his argument. It can also alert you to ideological positions, hidden agendas or biases. 5. Contextualize: Put it in perspective. When you contextualize, you essentially “re-view” a text you’ve encountered, framed by its historical, cultural, material, or intellectual circumstances. 6. Compare and Contrast: Set course readings against each other to determine their relationships (hidden or explicit). 2 pages – must read the articles.
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