Critical reading is a crucial part of writing strong academic essays. Actually, active reading
and writing are very similar. In both situations, you learn by actively interacting with a text.
When you critically read, you are never a passive participant, but an active builder
of meaning. Enhancing your natural tendency to be critical and curious will make any text
more real and useful to you in college.
Before you even read a single paragraph of your article, it is good to get out a pen,
highlighter, and to print out my Double Entry Log found in our learning module. The log
is divided up into 6 sections...you will remember these 6 elements from the lecture on the Rhetorical
Situation. Actually, analyzing the rhetorical situation is in many ways the same thing as
critical reading. Another wise thing to do before you actually read the essay is to look
at the title. Make predictions about what you think the article will discuss and connecting
to prior knowledge will help your critical analysis become more effective.
There are 2 parts to our critical reading. The first part is where you gather unbiased
evidence from the article. In your essay, you will use this unbiased evidence to construct
your summary, which will consist of your intro paragraph and body paragraph #1. Mark the
thesis and main points of your selected article. Identify important ideas. It's important to
read the article lightly the first time, making fewer marks. Then when you read it again,
you can layer in deeper identification of the author's ideas.
Identify the overall purpose of the author. Who is the author's audience? Identify any
parts that are confusing so you can re-read it later. In short, when you are reading the
article the first few times, read it as if you were an anthropologist...you want to simply
uncover the author's ideas.
It is very important to remove any bias from your writing when you are conducting the summary
portion of the essay. Do not input any of your own opinions and bias. Students often
do this by accident by having a dreary or serious tone when summarizing a point with
which they disagree. Stay neutral here in this portion of the reading and note taking.
Once you have identified the author's main ideas from the article, its time to begin
questioning and analyzing the text. Analyzing a text means that you will break it apart
into pieces to find out how all the pieces relate to each other. As you read the author's
claims, do you feel like he is reaching you as a reader? You will want to identify why
he is or isn't convincing you. Consider any assumptions the author is making.
For example, "[I]f a college recruiter argues that the school is superior to most others
because its ratio of students to teachers is low, the unstated assumptions are (1) that
students there will get more attention, and (2) that more attention results in a better
education." Identifying assumptions like these help you identify weak points in the article.
In your essay, any time you give a critical response, you will want to support your response
with evidence. A nice pattern you can sometimes use is to 1) refer to the author by reminding
your reader of something you previously summarized from the intro or body paragraph one, 2) then
you should critically respond to it, and then 3) provide evidence from the article that
supports your critical response. It's nice to pick an element from our rhetorical
situation and use it to look at it your article through different glasses. For example, you
can look at the Thesis & Main Ideas. For the summary portion of the essay you would simply
identify main points and key passages. Then you can flip into your critical glasses to
identify assumptions, contradictions, and omitted arguments.
You can also look at the elements of language and style. In the summary portion of your
essay, you will simply identify the author's tone as casual, ironic preachy, humorous,
academic, and more. If the author uses a metaphor or image that you find significant, it is
good to share those with your reader in your essay.
But, when you flip into your critical glasses, you will interpret weather or not the tone
supported or distracted the author's message. Finally, one last example I'll give is of
the author's organization and evidence. When wearing your summary glasses, you can simply
identify how the article was organized and what kind of evidence is being used to prove
points. But then when you flip into your critical
glasses, you analyze if the organization was effective, if the evidence was too emotionally
charged or if it was bogged down by too much data and detail. You can even explain any
brief personal experiences that help prove your assertions towards the author.
Overall, as you read, you are decoding a message from the author. As a writer, you have the
responsibility to identify the author's message and actively question, reason with, and illuminate
the text. I hope this video helps you as you begin to
read and critically analyze your selected essay.