You may have spent more time on some reading tasks than others. For example, when we are interested in one particular piece of information or fact from a text, we usually put that text aside once we have located the information we were looking for.
In other cases, you may have been reading for hours on end taking careful notes and asking questions. If you share the results of your investigation into your reading habits with your classmates, you may also notice that some of their reading habits and strategies were different from yours.
Like writing strategies, approaches to reading may vary from person to person depending on our previous experiences with different topics and types of reading materials, expectations we have of different texts, and, of course, the purpose with which we are reading.
Life presents us with a variety of reading situations which demand different reading strategies and techniques. At the heart of writing and research, however, lies the kind of reading known as critical reading.
Critical examination of sources is what makes their use in research possible and what allows writers to create rhetorically effective and engaging texts. Critical readers are able to interact with the texts they read through carefully listening, writing, conversation, and questioning. They do not sit back and wait for the meaning of a text to come to them, but work hard in order to create such meaning.
Critical readers are not made overnight. Becoming a critical reader will take a lot of practice and patience. Depending on your current reading practices and experiences with reading, becoming a critical reader may require a significant change in your whole understanding of the reading process.
The trade-off is worth it, however. By becoming a more critical and active reader, you will also become a better researcher and a better writer. Last but not least, you will enjoy reading and writing a whole lot more because you will become actively engaged in both.
Consider the following passage describing the substance of critical and active reading. Notice that Bartholomae and Petrosky describe reading process in pro-active terms. Critical reading, then, is a two-way process. As reader, you are not a consumer of words, waiting patiently for ideas from the printed page or a web-site to fill your head and make you smarter. Instead, as a critical reader, you need to interact with what you read, asking questions of the author, testing every assertion, fact, or idea, and extending the text by adding your own understanding of the subject and your own personal experiences to your reading.
In order to understand the mechanisms and intellectual challenges of critical reading, we need to examine some of our deepest and long-lasting assumptions about reading. Perhaps the two most significant challenges facing anyone who wants to become a more active and analytical reader is understanding that printed texts do not contain inarguable truths and to learn to question and talk back to those texts.
One of the biggest challenge students face in trying to become critical readers is getting away from the idea that they have to believe everything they read on a page. Years of schooling have taught many of us to believe that published texts present inarguable, almost absolute truths. The printed page has authority because, before publishing his or her work, every writer goes through a lengthy process of approval, review, revision, fact-checking, and so on.
Consequently, this theory goes, what gets published must be true. And if it is true, it must be taken at face value, not questioned, challenged, or extended in any way. Perhaps, the ultimate authority among the readings materials encountered by college belongs to the textbook.
As students, we all have had to read and almost memorize textbook chapters in order to pass an exam. And it is certainly possible to read textbooks critically and actively. But the habit to read every text as if one were preparing for an exam, as if it was a source of unquestionable truth and knowledge, prevents many from becoming active readers. Treating texts as if they were sources of ultimate and unquestionable knowledge and truth represents the view of reading as consumption.
According to this view, writers produce ideas and knowledge, and we, readers, consume them. But it is critical reading that allows us to create new ideas from what we read and to become independent and creative learners. Critical reading is a collaboration between the reader and the writer.
It offers readers the ability to be active participants in the construction of meaning of every text they read and to use that meaning for their own learning and self-fulfillment. Not even the best researched and written text is absolutely complete and finished.
However, even the definitive works get revised over time and they are always open to questioning and different interpretations. To understand how the claim that every reader makes his or her meaning from texts works, it is necessary to examine what is know as the rhetorical theory of reading. Briefly explained, Brent treats reading not only as a vehicle for transmitting information and knowledge, but also as a means of persuasion. Knowledge is what one believes, what one accepts as being at least provisionally true.
This short passage contains two assertions which are key to the understanding of mechanisms of critical reading. Surely, such reading can fill our heads with information, but will that information become our knowledge in a true sense, will we be persuaded by it, or will we simply memorize it to pass the test and forget it as soon as we pass it?
Of course not! All of us can probably recall many instances in which we read a lot to pass a test only to forget, with relief, what we read as soon as we left the classroom where that test was held. If you present a text that is remotely controversial to a group of people, some will be convinced by it and some not, and those who are convinced will be convinced in different degrees.
Critical and active readers not only accept the possibility that the same texts will have different meanings for different people, but welcome this possibility as an inherent and indispensable feature of strong, engaged, and enjoyable reading process. Persuasion is possible only when the reader is actively engaged with the text and understands that much more than simple retrieval of information is at stake when reading.
What this means is that when we read a new text, we do not begin with a clean slate, an empty mind. However unfamiliar the topic of this new reading may seem to us, we approach it with a large baggage of previous knowledge, experiences, points of view, and so on.
This, of course, does not mean that, as readers, we should persist in keeping our old ideas about everything and actively resist learning new things. Rather, it suggests that the reading process is an interaction between the ideas in the text in front of us and our own ideas and pre-conceptions about the subject of our reading. We do not always consciously measure what we read according to our existing systems of knowledge and beliefs, but we measure it nevertheless.
Reading, according to Brent, is judgment, and, like in life where we do not always consciously examine and analyze the reasons for which we make various decisions, evaluating a text often happens automatically or subconsciously One of the traits of active readers is their willingness to seek out other texts and people who may be able to help them in their research and learning. For many beginning researchers and writers, the inability to seek out such connections often turns into a roadblock on their research route.
Consider a class of students asked to investigate some problem on campus and to propose a solution to it. They are asked to use both primary interviews, surveys, etc.
Conducting secondary research allows a writer to connect a local problem he or she is investigating and a local solution he or she is proposing with a national and even global context, and to see whether the local situation is typical or a-typical.
One student decides to investigate the issue of racial and ethnic diversity on our campus. The student has no trouble designing research questions and finding people to interview and survey.
His subjects included students and faculty as well as the university vice-president who was charged with overseeing the work of the diversity task force. Overall, this writer had little trouble conducting and interpreting primary research that led him to conclude that, indeed,the campus is not diverse enough and that most students would like to see the situation change.
The next step the writer takes is to look at the websites of some other schools similar in size and nature to his, to see how the university compared on the issue of campus diversity with others.
He is able to find some statistics on the numbers of minorities at other colleges and universities that allowed him to create a certain backdrop for his primary research that he had conducted earlier. But good writing goes beyond the local situation. Good writing tries to connect the local and the national and the global. It tries to look beyond the surface of the problem, beyond simply comparing numbers and other statistics. It seeks to understand the roots of a problem and propose a solution based on a local and well as a global situation and research.
The primary and secondary research conducted by the student was not allowing him to take that step from analyzing local data to understanding the problem in context nationally or globally.
He needed some other type of research sources. At that point, however, the writers hits an obstacle. How and where, he reasoned, would we find other secondary sources, such as books, journals, and websites, about the lack of diversity on his campus? The answer to that question was that, at this stage in his research and writing, he did not need to look for more sources about his local problem with the lack of diversity. He needed to look at diversity and ways to increase it as a national and global issue.
He needed to generalize the problem and, instead of looking at a local example, to consider its implications for the issue he was studying overall. Such research would not only allow the writer to examine the problem as a whole but also to see how it was being solved in other places. This, in turn, might have helped him to propose a local solution. Critical readers and researchers understand that it is not enough to look at the research question locally or narrowly.
After conducting research and understanding their problem locally, or as it applies specifically to them, active researchers contextualize their investigation by seeking out texts and other sources which would allow them to see the big picture. Sometimes, it is hard to understand how external texts which do not seem to talk directly about your specific topic can help you research and write about questions, problems, and issues related to that topic. The emerging theme in that paper was that of discipline and sacrifice required of student athletes.
Simultaneously, that student was reading a chapter from the book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault called Discipline and Punish. Listening to the above podcast and watching the above video should help anyone using this resource to better understand the basics of rhetoric and rhetorical situations. Just as the vidcast and video above imply, rhetoric can refer to just the persuasive qualities of language.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle strongly influenced how people have traditionally viewed rhetoric. At its worst, the simplification of rhetoric has led people to assume that rhetoric is merely something that manipulative people use to get what they want usually regardless of moral or ethical concerns.
In brief, individual people tend to perceive and understand just about everything differently from one another this difference varies to a lesser or greater degree depending on the situation, of course. This expanded perception has led a number of more contemporary rhetorical philosophers to suggest that rhetoric deals with more than just persuasion.
George A. New York: Oxford UP, Burke, Kenneth. The most basic way of evoking appropriate emotional responses in an audience, according to Corbett, is the use of vivid descriptions Using ethical appeals, or appeals based on the character of the writer, involves establishing and maintaining your credibility in the eyes of your readers.
In other words, writers must think about how they are presenting themselves to their audience. Consider all the times when your decision about the merits of a given argument was affected by the person or people making the argument. For example, when watching television news, are you predisposed against certain cable networks and more inclined towards others because you trust them more?
So, how can a writer establish a credible persona for his or her audience? One way to do that is through external research. Conducting research and using factual proofs logos is effective, but it also shows readers that the author has done homework and knows about the topic. This knowledge, the sense of authority, helps writers be more effective. The logical, pathetic, and ethical appeals work in a dynamic combination with one another.
It is sometimes hard to separate one kind of proof from another and the methods by which the writer achieved the desired rhetorical effect. For example, if a writer uses data, which are likely to cause readers to be emotional, the data can enhance the pathetic aspect of the argument.
The key to using the three appeals, is to use them in combination with each other, and in moderation. It is impossible to construct a successful argument by relying too much on one or two appeals while neglecting the others. For example, another Greek philosopher and rhetorician Plato saw rhetoric as a means of discovering the truth, including personal truth, through dialog and discussion. According to Plato, rhetoric can be directed outward at readers or listeners , or inward at the writer him or herself.
In the latter case, the purpose of rhetoric is to help the author discover something important about his or her own experience and life. The third major rhetorical school of Ancient Greece whose views have profoundly influenced our understanding of rhetoric were the Sophists. The Sophists were teachers of rhetoric for hire. The primary goal of their activities was to teach skills and strategies for effective speaking and writing. Many Sophists claimed that they could make anyone into an effective rhetorician.
In their most extreme variety, Sophistic rhetoric claims that virtually anything could be proven if the rhetorician has the right skills. The legacy of Sophistic rhetoric is controversial. Some scholars, including Plato himself, have accused the Sophists of bending ethical standards in order to achieve their goals, while others have praised them for promoting democracy and civic participation through argumentative discourse.
What do these various definitions of rhetoric have to do with research writing? Or, perhaps you did not understand very well whom your writing was supposed to appeal to. It is hard to commit to purposeless writing done for no one in particular.
Purpose Good writing always serves a purpose. Texts are created to persuade, entertain, inform, instruct, and so on. In a real writing situation, these discrete purposes are often combined. Recall any text you wrote, in or outside of school. Think not only of school papers, but also of letters to relatives and friends, e-mails, shopping lists, online postings, and so on.
Audience The second key element of the rhetorical approach to writing is audience-awareness. The key principles that every writer needs to follow in order to reach and affect his or her audience are as follows:. Writing Activity: Analyzing Audience Every writer needs to consider his or her audience carefully when writing. Otherwise, you writing will be directed at no one in particular. As a result, your purpose will become unclear and your work will lose its effectiveness.
Identify any recent writing task that you faced. You may consider the writing task you applied in the first exercise. As with all the exploration activities included in this chapter, do not limit yourself to school writing assignments. Include letters, e-mails, notes, and any other kinds of writing you may do. Exigence Exigence, or the need to convey a message, is an important pa rt of the rhetorical situation.
It is a part of the writing context that was mentioned earlier in the chapter.
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