CRITICAL READING TOWARD CRITICAL WRITING

Strong academic writing, the kind students need to do to be successful in college and graduate
school, depends on the ability to read sources critically. Most of the essays you write will involve
reflection on written texts -- the thinking and research that have already been done on your
subject or topic.

In order to write your own analysis of this subject, you will need to do careful reading of
sources and to use them judiciously to make your own argument. The judgments and
interpretations you make of the texts you read are the first steps towards formulating your own
approach to a topic.

CRITICAL READING: WHAT IS IT?

To read critically is to make judgments about how a text is argued. This is a highly reflective
skill requiring you to “stand back” and gain some distance from the text you are reading. (You
might have to read a text through once to get a basic grasp of content before you launch into
an intensive critical reading.) THE KEY IS THIS:

-- don’t read looking only or primarily for information

-- do read looking for ways of thinking about the subject matter

When you are reading, highlighting, or taking notes, avoid extracting and compiling lists of
evidence, lists of facts and examples. Avoid approaching a text by asking “What information can
I get out of it?”

Rather ask “How does this text work? How is it argued? How is the evidence (the facts,
examples, etc.) used and interpreted? How does the text reach its conclusions?

HOW DO I READ LOOKING FOR WAYS OF THINKING?

1. First determine the central claims or purpose of the text (its thesis). A critical reading
attempts to identify and assess how these central claims are developed or argued.

2. Begin to make some judgments about context. What audience is the text written for? Who
is it in dialogue with? (This will probably be other scholars or authors with differing
viewpoints.) In what historical context is it written? All these matters of context can
contribute to your assessment of what is going on in a text.
3. Distinguish the kinds of reasoning the text employs. What concepts are defined and used?
Does the text appeal to a theory or theories? Is any specific methodology laid out? If there
is an appeal to a particular concept, theory, or method, how is that concept, theory, or
method then used to organize and interpret the data? You might also examine how the text
is organized: how has the author analyzed (broken down) the material? Be aware that
different disciplines (i.e. history, sociology, philosophy, biology) will have different ways of
arguing.
4. Examine the evidence (the supporting facts, examples, etc) the text employs. Supporting
evidence is indispensable to an argument. Having worked through Steps 1-3, you are now
in a position to grasp how the evidence is used to develop the argument and its controlling
claims and concepts. Steps 1-3 allow you to see evidence in its context. Consider the kinds
of evidence that are used. What counts as evidence in this argument? Is the evidence
statistical? literary? historical? etc. From what sources is the evidence taken? Are these
sources primary or secondary?

5. Critical reading may involve evaluation. Your reading of a text is already critical if it
accounts for and makes a series of judgments about how a text is argued. However, some
essays may also require you to assess the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. If the
argument is strong, why? Could it be better or differently supported? Are there gaps, leaps,
or inconsistencies in the argument? Is the method of analysis problematic? Could the
evidence be interpreted differently? Are the conclusions warranted by the evidence
presented? What are the unargued assumptions? Are they problematic? What might an
opposing argument be?

SOME PRACTICAL TIPS:

1. Critical reading occurs after some preliminary processes of reading. Begin by skimming
research materials, especially introductions and conclusions, in order to strategically choose
where to focus your critical efforts.

2. When highlighting a text or taking notes from it, teach yourself to highlight argument: those
places in a text where an author explains her analytical moves, the concepts she uses, how
she uses them, how she arrives at conclusions. Don’t let yourself foreground and isolate
facts and examples, no matter how interesting they may be. First, look for the large
patterns that give purpose, order, and meaning to those examples. The opening sentences
of paragraphs can be important to this task.

3. When you begin to think about how you might use a portion of a text in the argument you
are forging in your own paper, try to remain aware of how this portion fits into the whole
argument from which it is taken. Paying attention to context is a fundamental critical move.

4. When you quote directly from a source, use the quotation critically. This means that you
should not substitute the quotation for your own articulation of a point. Rather, introduce
the quotation by laying out the judgments you are making about it, and the reasons why
you are using it. Often a quotation is followed by some further analysis.
5. Critical reading skills are also critical listening skills. In your lectures, listen not only for
information but also for ways of thinking. Your instructor will often explicate and model
ways of thinking appropriate to a discipline.

CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES

These seven critical reading strategies can be learned readily and then applied not only to
reading selections in a composition or literature class, but also to your other college reading.
Mastering these strategies will help you handle difficult material with confidence.

 Annotating: 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.
o Most readers annotate in layers, adding further annotations on second and third
readings.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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 to teachers asking you questions about your reading.
o Questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more
fully, and often this technique works.
o 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.
 o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o Make a brief note in the margin about what you feel or about what in the text
created the challenge.
o Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally
challenged.
o What patterns do you see?

 Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them in your
own words.
o Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding the
content and structure of a reading selection.
o Whereas outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes
a selection's main argument in brief.
o Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it may be done separately
(as it is in this class).
o The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between
the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples.
o The main ideas form the backbone, the strand that hold the various parts and
pieces of the text together.
o Outlining the main ideas helps you to discover this structure.
o 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 means 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.
o 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.
o An argument has two essential parts: a claim and support.
o The claim asserts a conclusion -- an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of
view - that the writer wants you to accept.
 o 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.
o When you assess an argument, you are concerned with the process of reasoning
as well as its truthfulness (these are not the same thing).
o 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.

Sources:

“Critical Thinking across the Curriculum Project.” Longview Community College. 2006. 15 Jan,

2008 <http://www.mcckc.edu/longview/ctac/>.

Source: Knott, Deborah. U of Toronto. New College Writing Centre, U of Toronto; revised 2000. 15 Jan.

2008 <http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/critrdg.html>.