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Critical Reading

1.  Previewing: Learning 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 rhetorical situation.

 2.  Contextualizing: 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.  

3.  Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content.

As students, you are accustomed to teachers asking you questions about your reading. These questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more fully. When you need to understand and use new information it helps if you write questions as you read the text. Each question should usually focus on a main idea and should be expressed in your own words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph. Of course, as your understanding grows, you should try to answer these questions. 

4.  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 beliefs, or your positions on current issues. As you read a text for the first time,  make a brief note in your notebook about what you feel or about what in the text created the challenge. Look over your notes where you felt personally challenged. Do you see any patterns? 


5.  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. Outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing briefly synopsizes a selection's main argument. 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 words.

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.  

6.  Evaluating a text: 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 recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully evaluated. An argument has two 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 evaluate a text, you are concerned with the process of reasoning as well as its truthfulness (these are not the same thing).

7.  Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them better.


Many of the authors we read are concerned with the similar issues or questions, but discuss them in different ways. Fitting a text into an ongoing discussion helps increase understanding of why an author approached a particular issue or question in the way she or he did.
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