• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ANALYZING two kinds of subjects, one of which we might call “the world” (anything and everything you want to better understand), and the other, the world of reading—that is, other people’s ideas as these are developed in writing. Throughout the book’s first four chapters, we have been concentrating, implicitly or explicitly, on ways of analyzing both worlds. In this chapter, we dwell on this second world—the world of reading.

Here is a list of the chapter’s strategies for writing about reading, each with a brief summary of what it involves. We will then go on to explain each in more detail.

READING ANALYTICALLY

Find alternatives to reading for the gist: become conversant with the reading.

Go local—start with sentences (pointing, passage-based focused freewriting, paraphrasing, commonplace book)

Situate the reading rhetorically—find what it seeks to accomplish and what it is set against: the pitch, the complaint, and the moment

Seek to understand the reading fairly on its own terms—track the thinking of the piece as it moves through complication and qualification

Use the reading as a model

Apply the reading as a lens

THE THREE LIVES OF A READING

This chapter focuses on how to approach readings analytically, especially the kinds of complex reading you are likely to encounter in college and ultimately in the workplace. The chapter offers you ways to accomplish two primary tasks: (1) how to own a difficult reading, that is, how to make the thinking in a reading yours; and (2) how to use the reading, once you own it.

In practical terms, this chapter will focus on writing about reading in three contexts, which we refer to as the three lives of a reading. These are

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,