Seven critical reading strategies
1This 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.
2. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between your contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the text.
3.As 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.
4.The reading that you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, your unconsciously held beliefs, or your positions on current issues.
5.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.
6. 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
7.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.
1This 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.
2. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between your contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the text.
3.As 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.
4.The reading that you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, your unconsciously held beliefs, or your positions on current issues.
5.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.
6. 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
7.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.