What Kind of Reader Are You?

You read a lot, probably more that you think. You read for your academic studies. You may read fiction, magazines, newspapers. But you also read other texts. These may include food labels, instructions, product reviews, grocery lists, maps, driving directions, road signs, and more. You don’t read all these texts in the same way; you read them with different purposes and using different reading strategies and techniques. The first step towards becoming a critical and active reader is examining your reading process and your reading preferences.

Your reading analysis likely highlighted that reading strategies differ depending on the reading task and what you plan to do with the results of the reading. If, for example, you read a textbook in order to write an essay, chances are you “read for information,” trying to remember as much material as possible so that you could formulate ideas for the essay. If you read a good novel, you probably just focused on following the story. If you read something that you hoped would help you answer some personal question or solve some personal problem, you may have compared and contrasted the information that you read with your own life experiences. Life presents us with a variety of reading situations which demand different reading strategies and techniques.

Critical Reading

Reading for academic purposes requires reading for information and main ideas and, more importantly, reading to respond to and evaluate the ideas in a text, as you actively consider what you’re reading. This process is most often called critical reading.

Key Features of Critical Reading

Critical readers are able to interact with the texts they read by carefully listening, writing, conversing, and questioning. They do not sit back and wait for the meaning of a text to come to them; rather, they work hard in order to create such meaning. Critical readers are not made overnight. Becoming a critical reader will take a lot of practice and patience. Depending on your experiences with reading, becoming a critical reader may require a significant change in your whole understanding of the reading process. The trade-off is worth it, however. By becoming a more critical and active reader, you will also become a better researcher and a better writer. A compelling passage describing the substance of critical and active reading comes from the introduction to the book Ways of Reading by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky:

Reading involves a fair measure of push and shove. You make your mark on the book and it makes its mark on you. Reading is not simply a matter of hanging back and waiting for a piece, or its author, to tell you what the writing has to say. In fact, one of the difficult things about reading is that the pages before you will begin to speak only when the authors are silent and you begin to speak in their place, sometimes for them—doing their work, continuing their projects—and sometimes for yourself, following your own agenda.

Notice that Bartholomae and Petrosky describe reading process in proactive terms. Meaning of every text is “made,” not received. Readers need to “push and shove” in order to create their own, unique content of every text they read. It is up to you as a reader to make the pages in front of you “speak” by talking with and against the text, by questioning and expanding it.

Critical reading, then, is a two-way process. As reader, you are not a consumer of words, waiting patiently for ideas from the printed page or a website to fill your head. Instead, as a critical reader, you need to interact with what you read, asking questions of the author, testing every assertion, fact, or idea, and extending the text by adding your own understanding of the subject and your own personal experiences to your reading.

Here are some key points to remember when reading critically:

• No text, however well-written and authoritative, contains its own, pre-determined meaning.
• Readers must work hard to create meaning from every text.
• Critical readers interact with the texts they read by questioning them, responding to them, and expanding upon them, usually in writing.
• To create meaning, critical readers use various approaches, strategies, and techniques, which include applying their personal experiences and existing knowledge to the reading process.
• Critical readers actively seek out other texts related to the topic of their investigation.

The following strategies can help you read critically. You may want to apply them in the form of annotations in the margins of a printed text, or reading journal notes as you read an electronic text.  Note that you often need to read the text more than once in order to engage in a conversation with the text. In this conversation with the text, you can:

• ask questions
• agree or disagree with the author
• question the evidence presented in the text
• offer counter-evidence
• offer additional evidence, examples, stories, and so on that support the author’s argument
• note other texts that advance the same or similar arguments
• note personal experiences that enhance your reading of the text
• consider the context of the text: who wrote it and when, the author’s purpose, the type of publication in which it appeared, etc.

The next video is actually the first of a series titled “Reading Strategies for Research Students.” The playlist includes 14 videos, 2-3 minutes each, including discussions of how to read with purpose, how to read journal articles, and reading to improve your writing.