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By Root 10084 0

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 Reading: Beyond Banking,” lists four tasks that writing about reading at the college level normally requires:

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