Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [77]
finding the questions rather than just the answers,
putting key passages from a reading into conversation with each other,
using an idea or methodology in a reading in order to generate thinking about something else, and
gaining control of complex ideas on your own rather than expecting others (such as teachers) to do this work for you.
These tasks require you to change your orientation to reading. How, you might ask, do I make this change, given that I am reading difficult material produced by experts? What does it mean to read actively and critically when I do not yet have enough knowledge to take issue with what the readings are saying?
There are two key acts of mind—positions you must accept—if you are to play this more active role in writing about reading:
Learn to speak the language of the text. Every course is in some sense a foreign language course: if a writer wishes to be heard, he or she needs to acquire the vocabulary of the experts. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the actual words in a reading and to use them when you write.
Accept that good reading is a physical as well as a mental activity. Passing your eyes or highlighter over the text or generalizing about it or copying notes from someone else’s PowerPoint will not teach you the skills to become an independent thinker. These activities are too passive; they don’t trigger your brain into engaging the material. To get physical with the reading, focus on particular words and sentences, copy them out, restate them, and clarify for yourself what you do and do not understand.
FOCUS ON INDIVIDUAL SENTENCES
GOING LOCAL
Pointing
Passage-based focused freewriting
Paraphrasing
Keep a commonplace book
Analyzing needs to be anchored, and anchoring to a general impression, a global sense of what the reading is about, is like putting a hook in a cloud. There is nothing specific to think about, to rephrase, to nudge towards implications or back to assumptions. The best way to remember what you read, and to have ideas about it, is to start with the local— individual sentences and short passages—and build up a knowledge base from there.
It does not matter which sentences you start with. What matters is to choose sentences that strike you as especially revealing, significant, or strange (see Notice and Focus, Chapter 2). Good reading is slow reading: it stops your forward momentum long enough to allow you to dwell on individual sentences and make the effort necessary to understand them.
A second and related way that people neglect the actual words is that they approach the reading looking to react. They are so busy looking to respond to other people’s statements that they don’t listen to what the other person is saying. A recent article on reading by the literary and educational theorist Robert Scholes suggests that people read badly because they substitute for the words on the page some association or predetermined idea that the words accidentally trigger in them. As a result, they rehearse their own gestalts rather than taking in what the writer is actually saying (see Robert Scholes, “The Transition to College Reading,” Pedagogy, volume 2, number 2, Duke UP, 2002, pp. 165–172).
We will now survey a few techniques for focusing on individual sentences.
Pointing
Pointing is a practice (associated with two writing theorists and master teachers, Peter Elbow and Sheridan Blau) in which members of a group take turns reading sentences aloud. Pointing provides a way of summarizing without generalizing, and it is one of the best ways to build community and to stimulate discussion.
Select sentences from a reading you are willing to voice.
Take turns reading aloud without raising hands. Read only one of your chosen sentences at a time. Later in the session, you may read again. Pointing usually lasts about five minutes and ends more or less naturally, when people no longer have sentences they wish to read.
No