Critical and Rhetorical Reading Strategies
In this unit, students will answer the following questions:
- What is critical reading?
- What is rhetorical reading?
- What are rhetorical reading strategies?
- What is digital reading?
- How is reading digital writing different from reading print?
What is critcal reading?
By Dan Martin
I'm sure almost everyone reading this now has said to themselves, “I read but I do not understand.” Learning how to concentrate and to read for a purpose is an ability acquired over time. Developing analytical and rhetorical reading skills is a vital component of ENG 101 and most first-year writing courses. Students need to develop the capacity to recognize how and why texts are rhetorically situated (intended audience, exigence, constraints, main points of the argument or claim, and evidence used to support the argument) and develop strategies for reading a range of different texts across disciplines and contexts. Students need to learn to be aware of the differences and similarities in academic discourses and genres across contexts and understand why those similarities and differences exist. Students need to develop the ability to annotate and summarize readings for main ideas and future use, including alternative reading and note-taking strategies. Students need to learn how to read for questions, problems, and evidences that define a rhetorical situation, how to read like a writer.
The WPA contends that students should: "Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations. Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials, including journal articles and essays, books, scholarly and professionally established and maintained databases or archives, and informal electronic networks and internet sources. Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate the writer's ideas with those from appropriate sources. Faculty in all programs and departments can build on this preparation by helping students learn:"
Reading and thinking rhetorically requires you to interrogate the relationship between ideas, arguments, and evidence. Why is a difficult text? What makes the text difficult? College courses will require you to read textbooks and scholarly articles that contain a great number of complex concepts or terms. While instructors try to choose texts that are at an appropriate level of difficulty for students, reading those texts can still be challenging.
Use the following questions to help you read texts rhetorically:
- What do I know about the topic already?
- Are there any terms or concepts mentioned in the text I am not familiar with? Should I look them up on the internet or dictionary?
- How does the author support their claim? What kind of reasoning or evidence are used?
- What is the central idea of the text? What is the main point the author is trying to make?
- How would I paraphrase or restate the main idea?
- Where and when was the text written?
- What is the author’s background?
- Who is the author’s intended audience of the text?
- Do I agree or disagree with the author? Why?
- Am I keeping an open mind to what the author is trying to say?
- Purpose: Why?
- Context: Where? When?
- Audience: Who? How many?
- Constraints: Affect? Effect?
- Rhetors: Who? How many?
- Form: What? Why?
- Scan Headings
- Scan Sections
- Think about the accessibility of the title
- Use MAPP and SOAP: Practice
- What else can we do to improve our critical reading?
- What rhetorical reading strategies?
- "Reading Games" by Karen Rosenburg
Critical reading asks you to engage with the text closely so you can paraphrase, summarize, quote, describe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate the text. Reading rhetorically and critically requires you to move beyond the level of extracting information and to actively consider the information in relation to purpose, audience, and context. To read critically, you will need to take it real slow, keep detailed notes, come back and reread the text multiple times.
What is rhetorical reading?
Haas and Flower’s: How do the author’s rhetorical moves and decisions shape the text, and how might audiences receive that discourse?