Tanner McDougal
Learning Outcome #3
Example of active reading/critical reading:
Example of informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking:
Journal 12
The first thing that I found to be helpful in the chapter was deciphering the conversation. This allowed me to think of how the author of a passage is not only explaining what they believe, but also what one or many others believe. This can be very helpful when doing a critical analysis of writing because the reader is able to pick up on all opposing arguments, thus forming a more educated opinion on the topic. Another thing that I found to be interesting in the chapter was when “they say” is unstated. The book then went on to explain how a reader can use clues in the text to be able to make an educated guess on what the actual “they say” is. Also, sometimes the author’s own thesis is not clear, so the reader must dive into the text and use similar clues to find out what the actual thesis is, along with the supplemental information. Another piece of this text that I found to be both interesting and helpful was with the Judith Butler example and “reading particularly challenging texts”. This is because the first time I read Butler’s three sentences, I was completely lost on what she was trying to say. I believe that this is mainly due to the complicated vocabulary that she used. However, the text showed ways of getting around this by putting the text into my own words that I can understand more easily. This helped me to figure out what exactly Butler was trying to say.
Response:
In the first example, there is a picture of my annotations from David Foster Wallace’s essay entitled, “Consider the Lobster”. One can notice that there is a lot of mark-up on this page that includes highlighting, comments, and questions. During my process of critical reading, I find it very important to engage with the text in that I am making lots of annotations. I do this because it keeps me on track and elevates my level of understanding of the text because I am not simply just skimming through the page and only taking away key points. I highlight things that I find important, comment on the page about my own thoughts or interpretation of what the author could be getting at, and I ask questions that I would like to know to help me better understand the piece and also to bring to class discussion. As Gilroy mentioned, “have an ongoing conversation with yourself” and “What does this mean”. I do both of these things as I critically read. One could see this in how I have a conversation with myself by highlighting and commenting on the text and I ask what the text means by writing down questions that I have on the page. In the second example, I respond to a chapter of “They Say, I Say” regarding “What’s Motivating This Writer”. During my response to the chapter, I made sure to include what I found to be helpful, beneficial, and interesting about the reading. What I believe to be the most important part of this example is how I explain what the significance was of me reading this chapter. As Gilroy stated, one should ask oneself, “Why am I being asked to read this text?” I made sure to include this by stating what I believed to be significant from the reading that I could use in class and on my projects. One example of where I do this in journal twelve is when I explained how I found the significance of using clues to decipher what “they say” to be important. I found this part to be significant to my use in projects because I can use this type of strategy in peer review and during revision of my own essays. This is because learning to decipher what “they say” is important when trying to help yourself or someone else’s essay by pointing out how to possibly improve an argument by using the opposing argument.
