7b Previewing a text
Find out all you can about a text before beginning to look closely at it, considering its context, author, subject, genre, and design.
PREVIEWING THE CONTEXT
- Where have you encountered the work? Are you encountering it in its original context? For example, an essay in a collection of readings may have been previously published in a magazine; a speech you watch on YouTube may have been delivered to a live or televised audience; a painting on a museum wall may have been created for a wealthy patron in a distant country centuries earlier.
- What can you infer from the original or current context of the work about its intended audience and purpose?
LEARNING ABOUT THE AUTHOR OR CREATOR
- What information can you discover about the author or creator of the text?
- What purpose, expertise, and possible agenda might you expect this person to have? Where do you think the author or creator is coming from in this text?
PREVIEWING THE SUBJECT
- What do you know about the subject of the text?
- What opinions do you have about the subject, and on what are your opinions based?
- What would you like to learn about the subject?
- What do you expect the main point to be? Why?
CONSIDERING THE TITLE, MEDIUM, GENRE, AND DESIGN
- What does the title (or caption or other heading) indicate?
- What do you know about the medium in which the work appears? Is it a text on the Web, a printed advertising brochure, a speech stored in iTunes, or an animated cartoon on television? What role does the medium play in achieving the purpose and connecting to the audience?
- What is the genre of the text—and what can it help illuminate about the intended audience or purpose? Why might the authors or creators have chosen this genre?
- How is the text presented? What do you notice about its formatting, use of color, visuals or illustrations, overall design, general appearance, and other design features?
Student preview of an assigned text
Fernando Sanchez and Sarah Lum, students in a first-year writing class, read and analyzed an academic article, “‘Mistakes Are a Fact of Life’: A National Comparative Study,” by Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen J. Lunsford. Some of the preview notes they made before reading the article appear below. (See 7c–e for additional steps in the critical reading from these students.) (Photos © Fernando Sanchez and Sarah Lum)
Information on context
This essay was published in College Composition and Communication in June 2008. According to the journal’s Web site, “College Composition and Communication publishes research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies that supports college teachers in reflecting on and improving their practices in teaching writing and that reflects the most current scholarship and theory in the field.” So the original audience was probably college writing teachers.
The essay begins with these words from poet and essayist Nikki Giovanni: “Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.” The introduction explains that the article will talk about a study of first-year college writing and compare it to “a similar study conducted over twenty years ago.”
About the author
Andrea A. Lunsford was an English professor and the director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University when this article appeared in 2008. She is also the author of the book we are using in our writing class. Karen J. Lunsford is an associate professor of writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
It was easy to find a lot of information on these authors on the Internet. According to Google Scholar, both have published many articles and conducted a lot of research on writing, so they have experience that relates to this article.
Subject of article
The authors will study writing from students across the country and see whether problems are increasing or whether mistakes are just “a fact of life.” I am the subject of this study without even knowing it! My high school teachers used to tell me to be careful not to include any “Internet lingo” in my writing. . . . I wonder if students really are losing the ability to write because of technology?
I see that the authors are replicating a study done by Andrea Lunsford and Robert Connors in 1984, and they will give a detailed comparison between the two studies. This essay may say that making mistakes in writing may not be such a bad thing.
Other preview information
The title includes a quotation from the epigraph that opens the essay and that sets the theme for the whole article, indicating that the authors will focus on the mistakes that others point out in this generation of student writing.
The genre of this essay is a scholarly article published in a journal. This journal requires MLA documentation style for endnotes and for the list of works cited. The essay also uses headings to signal changes in topics within the essay. Eight tables provide data to back up what the authors are saying.
Talking the Talk: Critical thinking