Introduction
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A Catalog of Reading Strategies
This chapter presents strategies to help you become a thoughtful reader. A thoughtful reader is above all a patient rereader, concerned not only with comprehending and remembering but also with interpreting and evaluating—on the one hand, striving to understand the text on its own terms; on the other hand, taking care to question its ideas.
The reading strategies in this chapter can help you enrich your thinking as a reader and participate in conversations as a writer. These strategies are as follows:
- Annotating: Recording your reactions to, interpretations of, and questions about a text as you read it
- Taking inventory: Listing and grouping your annotations and other notes to find meaningful patterns
- Outlining: Listing the text’s main ideas to reveal how it is organized
- Paraphrasing: Restating what you have read to clarify or refer to it
- Summarizing: Distilling the main ideas or gist of a text
- Synthesizing: Integrating into your own writing ideas and information gleaned from different sources
- Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical and cultural context
- Exploring the significance of figurative language: Examining how metaphors, similes, and symbols are used in a text to convey meaning and evoke feelings
- Looking for patterns of opposition: Inferring the values and assumptions embodied in the language of a text
- Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values: Examining the bases of your personal responses to a text
- Evaluating the logic of an argument: Determining whether an argument is well reasoned and adequately supported
- Recognizing emotional manipulation: Identifying texts that unfairly and inappropriately use emotional appeals based on false or exaggerated claims
- Judging the writer’s credibility: Considering whether writers represent different points of view fairly and know what they are writing about
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Although mastering these strategies will not make critical reading easy, it can make your reading much more satisfying and productive and thus help you handle even difficult material with confidence. In addition, these reading strategies will often be useful in your reading outside of school—for instance, these strategies can help you understand, evaluate, and comment on what political figures, advertisers, and competing businesses are saying.