CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES

Here I present seven critical reading strategies that I have shamelessly stolen from someone else. These are
strategies that you can learn readily and then apply not only to the reading selections in this class, but also to
your other college reading. Although mastering these strategies will not make the critical reading process an
easy one, it can make reading much more satisfying and productive and thus help you handle difficult material
well and with confidence.
Fundamental to each of these strategies is annotating directly on the page: underlining key words, phrases, or
sentences; writing comments or questions in the margins; bracketing important sections of the text;
constructing ideas with lines or arrows; numbering related points in sequence; and making note of anything
that strikes you as interesting, important, or questionable.
Most readers annotate in layers, adding further annotations on second and third readings. Annotations can be
light or heavy, depending on the reader's purpose and the difficulty of the material.

Previewing: Learning about a text before really reading it.
Previewing enables readers to get a sense of what the text is about and how it is organized before
reading it closely. This simple strategy includes seeing what you can learn from the headnotes or
other introductory material, skimming to get an overview of the content and organization, and
identifying the rhetorical situation.

Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.
When you read a text, you read it through the lens of your own experience. Your understanding of
the words on the page and their significance is informed by what you have come to know and value
from living in a particular time and place. But the texts you read were all written in the past,
sometimes in a radically different time and place. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to
recognize the differences between your contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the
text.
Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content.
As students, you are accustomed (I hope) to teachers asking you questions about your reading. These
questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more fully, and often this
technique works. When you need to understand and use new information though it is most beneficial
if you write the questions, as you read the text for the first time. With this strategy, you can write
questions any time, but in difficult academic readings, you will understand the material better and
remember it longer if you write a question for every paragraph or brief section. Each question should
focus on a main idea, not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own
words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph.
Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values: Examining your personal responses.
The reading that you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, your unconsciously held beliefs,
or your positions on current issues. As you read a text for the first time, mark an X in the margin at
each point where you fell a personal challenge to your attitudes, beliefs, or status. Make a brief note
in the margin about what you feel or about what in the text created the challenge. Now look again at
the places you marked in the text where you felt personally challenged. What patterns do you see?

Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them in your own words.
Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding the content and
structure of a reading selection. Whereas outlining revels the basic structure of the text, summarizing
synopsizes a selection's main argument in brief. Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it
may be done separately (as it is in this class). The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able
to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples. The main ideas formthe backbone, the strand that hold the various parts and pieces of the text together. Outlining the main
ideas helps you to discover this structure. When you make an outline, don't use the text's exact
words.
Summarizing begins with outlining, but instead of merely listing the main ideas, a summary
recomposes them to form a new text. Whereas outlining depends on a close analysis of each
paragraph, summarizing also requires creative synthesis. Putting ideas together again -- in your own
words and in a condensed form -- shows how reading critically can lead to deeper understanding of
any text.

Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact.
All writers make assertions that want you to accept as true. As a critical reader, you should not accept
anything on face value but to recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully
evaluated. An argument has two essential parts: a claim and support. The claim asserts a conclusion --
an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of view -- that the writer wants you to accept. The support
includes reasons (shared beliefs, assumptions, and values) and evidence (facts, examples, statistics,
and authorities) that give readers the basis for accepting the conclusion. When you assess an
argument, you are concerned with the process of reasoning as well as its truthfulness (these are not
the same thing). At the most basic level, in order for an argument to be acceptable, the support must
be appropriate to the claim and the statements must be consistent with one another.

Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to
understand them better.
Many of the authors we read are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to
discuss them in different ways. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase understanding of
why an author approached a particular issue or question in the way he or she did.