Reading actively and critically

Reading, like writing, is an active process that happens in steps. Most texts, such as the ones assigned in college, don’t yield their meaning with one quick reading. Rather, they require you to read and reread to grasp the main points and to comprehend a text’s many layers of meaning.

When you read actively, you pay attention to details you would miss if you just skimmed a text and let its words slip past you. First, you read to understand the main ideas. Then you pay attention to your own reactions by making note of what interests, surprises, or puzzles you. Active readers preview a text, annotate it, and then converse with it.

Previewing a text

Previewing—looking quickly through a text before you read—helps you understand its basic features and structures. A text’s title, for example, may reveal an author’s purpose; a text’s format or design may reveal what kind of text it is—a book, a report, a policy memo, and so on. The more you know about a text before you read it, the easier it will be to dig deeper into it.

Annotating a text

Annotating helps you record your responses to a text and answer the basic question, “What is this text about?” As you annotate, you take notes—you jot down questions and reactions in the margins of the text or on electronic or paper sticky notes. You might circle or underline the author’s main points. Or you might develop your own system of annotating by placing question marks or asterisks by the text’s thesis or major pieces of evidence. Your annotations will help you frame what you want to say about the author’s ideas or questions.

The following example shows how one student, Emilia Sanchez, annotated an article from CQ Researcher, a newsletter about social and political issues.

annotated article

Big Box Stores Are Bad for Main Street

BETSY TAYLOR

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Conversing with a text

Conversing with a text—or talking back to a text and its author—helps you move beyond your initial notes to draw conclusions about what you’ve read. Perhaps you ask additional questions, point out something that doesn’t make sense and why, or explain how the author’s points suggest wider implications. As you talk back to a text, you look more closely at how the author works through a topic, and you evaluate the author’s evidence and conclusions. Conversing takes your notes to the next level. For example, student writer Emilia Sanchez noticed on a first reading that her assigned text closed with an emotional appeal to the reader. On a second reading, she started to question whether that emotional appeal worked or whether it was really too simplistic a way to look at the topic.

Many writers use a double-entry notebook to converse with a text and its author and to generate insights and ideas. To create one, draw a line down the center of a notebook page. On the left side, record what the author says; include quotations, sentences, and key terms from the text. On the right side, record your observations and questions.

using sources responsibly: Put quotation marks around words you have copied, and keep an accurate record of page numbers for quotations.

Here is an excerpt from student writer Emilia Sanchez’s double-entry notebook.

note: To create a digital double-entry notebook, you can use a table or text boxes in a word processing program.

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Asking the “So what?” question

As you read and annotate a text, make sure you understand its thesis, or central idea. Ask yourself: “What is the author’s thesis?” Then put the author’s thesis to the “So what?” test: “Why does this thesis matter? Why does it need to be argued?” Perhaps you’ll conclude that the thesis is too obvious and doesn’t matter at all—or that it matters so much that you feel the author stopped short and overlooked key details. Or perhaps you’ll feel that a reasonable person might draw different conclusions about the issue.