Critical Approach in Reading

Critical Reading: What is it?

To read critically is to make judgments about how a text is argued. This is highly reflective skill requiring you to stand back and gain some distance from the text you are reading.

Why do we need to take critical approach to reading?

Regardless of how objective, technical, or scientific the subject matter, the author(s) will have made many decisions during the research and writing process, and each of these decisions is a potential for examination and debate, rather than for blind acceptance. You need to be prepared to step into the academic debate and to make your own evaluation of how much you are willing to accept what you read. Consider you read not as fact, but as the argument of the writer. Taking this starting point you will be ready to engage in critical reading.

Some Practical Tips

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

Some Practical Tips

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.
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.

Critical reading skills are also critical listening skills. In your lectures, listen not only for information but also for ways of thinking.

Critical Reading Strategies

1.

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 includes seeing what you can learn from the headnotes or other introductory material, skimming to gat an overview of the content and organization, and identifying the rhetorical content.

Critical Reading Strategies

2. Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.
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.

Critical Reading Strategies

3. Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content. These questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more fully, and often this technique works. 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 questions for every paragraph or brief section. Each question should focus on a main idea not on illustrations or details.

Critical Reading Strategies

4. 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 feel 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.

Critical Reading Strategies

5. Outlining and Summarizing: Identify the main ideas and restating them in your own words. These strategies are especially helpful strategies for understanding the content and structure of a reading selection. Outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes a selection main argument in brief.

The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples.

Critical Reading Strategies

6. Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact. 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 and evidence that give readers the basic for accepting the conclusions. 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.

Critical Reading Strategies

7. Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likeness and differences between texts to understand them better. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase understanding of why an author approached a particular issue or question.

Graphic Organizers

Graphic Organizers

Graphic Organizers

Graphic Organizers