7 CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES
about a text before really reading it.
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
Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.
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 attitudes and
those represented in the text.
Questioning to understand and remember:
Asking questions about the content.
students, you are accustomed (I hope) to teachers asking you 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 if you write the
questions, as you read the text for the first time. With this strategy, you can
write questions any time, but in difficult academic readings, you will
understand the material better and remember it longer if you write a question
for every paragraph or brief section. Each question should focus on a main idea,
not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own words,
not just copied from parts of the paragraph.
Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values:
Examining your personal responses.
The reading that you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, your
unconsciously held beliefs, or your 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 about what in the text created the challenge.
Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally
challenged. What patterns do you see?
Outlining and summarizing:
Identifying the main ideas and restating them in your own words.
Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding
the content and structure of a reading selection. Whereas outlining reveals the
basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes a selection's main argument
in brief. Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it may be done
separately (as it is in this class). The key to both outlining and summarizing
is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and
examples. The main ideas form the backbone, the strand that holds the various
parts and pieces of the text together. Outlining the main ideas helps you to
discover this structure. When you make an outline, don't use the text's exact
Summarizing begins with
outlining, but instead of merely listing the main ideas, a summary recomposes
them to form a new text. Whereas outlining depends on a close analysis of each
paragraph, summarizing also requires creative synthesis. Putting ideas together
again -- in your own words and in a condensed form -- shows how reading
critically can lead to deeper understanding of any text.
Evaluating an argument:
Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact.
All writers make assertions that they want you to accept as true. As a critical
reader, you should not accept anything on face value but to 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 as well as its truthfulness (these are
not the same thing). At the most basic level, in order for an argument to be
acceptable, the support must be appropriate to the claim and the statements must
be consistent with one another.
Comparing and contrasting related readings:
Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them
Many of the authors we read
are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to discuss
them in different ways. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase
understanding of why an author approached a particular issue or question in the
way he or she did.
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