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Format MLA

Volume of 2 pages (550 words)
Assignment type : Essay

Description
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).
THE QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
The assignment requires 5-7 typed questions/comments per brief at a minimum. These ‘briefs’ are not only indicative of satisfactory completion of course readings but also encourages critical thinking and interaction with the texts. These questions or comments require some thought. It is very easy to look at something you have never read, find something in “bold” or in a heading and write down “What is” in front of it. That surely can be one or two of your questions, but, that will not provoke our class discussions for long. An “A” quality brief includes questions that are not necessarily obvious. WE ARE READING FOR UNDERSTANDING – NOT FOR FACTS. Factual understanding takes time. With the power of technology these days, “facts” can be found and searched for – what it means takes thinking and contemplation. You cannot complete these readings as just a task to be completed. Rather, you must try to find what seems interesting to you and see how everything relates to why that is interesting to you. These briefs are meant to reflect or hint at the thinking you have invested in reading. In reading sociology, generally speaking, we are interested in how the relationship between the social contract and societal contract results in the topical manifestations that organize our experience. How does whatever you are reading relate to that organization? Thinking about it holistically will enable you to go past the obvious. Thematic concepts like inequality, race, class, gender, religion, law, etc. do not exist in a vacuum, but are manifestations of the tensions between social and societal organization affected by cultural, sub-cultural and historical factors – parsing these out is what we are up to.
THE CRITICAL READING
The “outline” portion not only reflects what you sort of, kind of “read” but serves as an “index” to understanding. It is intended to help you organize your understanding of the author’s arguments in a way that illustrates the structure of its contents in a thematic manner. Order matters. Hierarchy matters. Depth matters. Formatting matters. (A sentence like this:” is only readable because we already know where the spaces go. I encourage you to look at the internet before Web 2.0 when it was all formatted without style sheets and the era of Notepad! It is unbearably dense and difficult to intuitively grasp.) When you outline be sure to first try to number the paragraphs. Since we usually are reading documents with at least 20 paragraphs, let us use that number as an example:

• These 20 paragraphs can typically grouped thematically into just a 3-4 categories. That would be your “Level 1” headings. This is the thesis that ties the thesis of each paragraph in the group together. That means you will have an outline with 3-4 Level 1 headings grouping about 5-7 paragraphs together into a single idea. The overarching theme?

• Then go through each paragraph and find its thesis. What is its main point? These are your “Level 2” headings that organizes the key points, quotes or evidence. It’s the punch and kick combination.

• Then try to find what key points hold the thesis of each paragraph together. These are your “Level 3” headings.

• What does the author use to illustrate these key points? Is it a metaphor? A quotation from someone else? Examples that establish a pattern of some sort? These are your “Level 4” headings.

In terms of summary and analysis, these are straightforward: Your “summary” should organize and condense your outline into a paragraph of 200-300 words or so. This will address the thesis of the text and how the argument moves from the first point and evidence (and so on), through the conclusion. Your “analysis” moves away from description and emphasizes evaluation. In 100-200 words, try to test the logic, credibility, and emotional impact of the argument the author presents. In analyzing the text, reflect upon and decide how effectively (or poorly) its argument has been made. On what basis is the argument valid? On what basis does it fail? What makes it convincing?