To become a college writer, you need to become a critical, engaged reader—habitually questioning and conversing with the texts you read. When you read critically, you read with an open, curious, even skeptical mind to understand both what is said and why. You examine a text’s assumptions, assess its evidence, and weigh its conclusions. You read and reread to comprehend an author’s ideas and what those ideas mean to you. And when you write critically, you respond to a text and its author, with thoughtful questions and personal insights, offering your judgment of how the parts of a text contribute to its overall effect.

As you write across the disciplines, you will be asked to read, respond to, and analyze a wide range of complex texts—books, articles, essays, reports, case studies. To write about these texts, you need to read them actively. (See the charts at the bottom of the page.)