Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [83]
Usually, it is more important to learn how to use a complex theoretical lens than it is to arrive at a point from which you can launch an extended critique.
Even when an academic reading offers a single dominant claim, in most cases the writing will focus on limiting and qualifying that claim—categorizing it, dividing it into parts, tracing its implications, and so forth. So instead of approaching the reading with the question, “Where might this be wrong?”, ask yourself, “How is the argument presented, and why is it presented in this way?”
What Do We Mean by Critical Reading? A Music Professor Speaks
In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, music professor Ted Conner discusses ways of helping students develop more sophisticated reading skills.
Voices From Across the Curriculum
As a first step, we consider what we mean by a “critical reading.” Because the term itself has become so ingrained in our consciousness, we rarely think critically about what it means. So, we discuss moving beyond a summary of the content and cursory judgment. I ask students to take notes on each reading (content and commentary) and conclude with three points. These points may include a main idea of the article or a part of the author’s argument they found particularly interesting. We try to locate insights into the author’s reason for writing the essay and rhetorical gestures or techniques used by the author to influence the reader.
Does the author make his or her objectives and biases explicit? If not, we examine the rhetorical strategies authors employ to convince us of their objectivity. We observe the ways that language colors the presentation of facts— how “a bitter civil war that pitted the slave-holding Southern states against the rest of the country” was probably not written by an author sympathetic to the Confederacy.
Much of our time is spent investigating how authors construct their narratives: the mode of emplotment (comedy, tragedy, romance, satire), the way the argument is formed, and its ideological position—liberal, conservative, radical, anarchist. These various frames for viewing the reading help us to move beyond content, delay judgment, and evaluate readings on a more sophisticated level.
—Ted Conner, Professor of Music
READING AGAINST THE GRAIN
When we ask ourselves what a work (and, by implication, an author) might not be aware of communicating, we are reading against the grain. When we ask ourselves what a work seems aware of, what its (and, by implication, its author’s) conscious intentions are, we are reading with the grain.
Surely you have had the experience of looking back on something you wrote and wondering where it came from. You didn’t plan to say it that way ahead of time. This suggests that writers can never be fully in control of what they communicate—that words always, inescapably, communicate more (and less) than we intend. Any of us who has had what we thought a perfectly clear and well-intentioned letter misinterpreted (or so we thought) by its recipient can understand this idea. When we look at the letter again, we usually see what it said that we hadn’t realized (at least not consciously) we were saying.
Communication of all kinds takes place both directly and indirectly. Reading against the grain—looking for what a work is saying that it might not know it is saying, that it might not mean to say—requires us to notice and emphasize implicit patterns and make their significance explicit. So, for example, in the classic novel Jane Eyre, the narrator Jane repeatedly remarks on her own plain appearance, with the implication that physical beauty is transient and relatively insignificant. Reading against the grain, we’d see the novel’s very obsession with plainness as a symptom of how worried it is about the subject, how much it actually believes (but won’t admit) that looks matter. (See also Chapter 9 for methods of analyzing the logic of