Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [76]
As an Object for Analysis
As a Model for Imitating
As a Lens for Viewing Other Material
For More on Writing About Reading Inevitably, not everything that we have to say about reading can be included in this chapter. The chapter assumes, first of all, that you will be using the heuristics in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 when you read. So, for example, when you read virtually anything, you will want to:
look for patterns of repetition and contrast (aka The Method, Chapter 2),
paraphrase (Chapter 2),
make the implicit explicit (Chapter 3),
uncover assumptions and reformulate binaries (Chapter 4), and
do passage-based focused freewriting (Chapter 4).
Other essential reading-related skills will be treated in later chapters. These include
writing analytical summaries (in Chapter 7, Making Common Topics More Analytical),
writing reaction papers (also in Chapter 7),
putting readings into conversation with other readings—research-based writing (in Chapter 13, Using Sources Analytically), and
decoding disciplinary formats (in Chapter 15, Forms and Formats Across the Curriculum)
HOW TO READ: WORDS MATTER
The greatest enemies of reading analytically are “reading for the gist” and the transparent theory of language. Reading for the gist causes readers to leap to global (and usually unsubstantiated) impressions, attending only superficially to what they are reading. The transparent theory of language (first introduced in the discussion of paraphrase in Chapter 2) has a similar effect. This theory invites readers to see through the words as if they were clear windows, suggesting that there is a meaning that can be accessed without the language. Failure to arrest attention on the words causes readers to miss all but the vaguest impression of the ideas that the words embody.
Any child psychology textbook will tell you that as we acquire language, we acquire categories that shape our understanding of the world. Words allow us to ask for things, to say what’s on our mind. This is not to say that words are the only reality, but to an enormous extent, we understand the world and our relation to it by working through language.
Considering how central language is in our lives, it’s amazing how little we think about words. We tend to assume things mean simply or singly, but virtually all words have multiple meanings, and words mean differently depending on context. Consider the following examples of memorably silly headlines: “Teacher Strikes Idle Kids,” “New Vaccines May Contain Rabies,” “Local High School Drop-outs Cut in Half,” and “Include Your Children When Baking Cookies” (or if you prefer, “Kids Make Nutritious Snacks”). Language is always getting away from us—in such sentences as “The bandage was wound around the wound,” or in the classic, “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” The meanings of words and the kinds of sense a sentence makes are rarely stable.
BECOME CONVERSANT INSTEAD OF READING FOR THE GIST
Many readers operate under the mistaken impression that they are to read for the gist—for the main point, to be gleaned through a speed-reading. Although there are virtues to skimming, the vast majority of writing tasks you will encounter in college and in the workplace require your conversancy with material you have read. To become conversant means that
after a significant amount of work with the material, you should be able to talk about it conversationally with other people and answer questions about it without having to look everything up; and
you should be able to converse with the material—to be in some kind of dialogue with it, to see the questions the material asks, and to pose your own questions about it.
Few people are able to really understand things they read or see without making the language of that material in some way their own. We become conversant, in other words, by finding ways to actively engage material rather than moving passively through it.
Owning the Reading
The short take in Chapter 1, “Writing About