Critical Reading

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.

Activity: Analyze Your Reading Habits

decorative imageList all the reading you have done in the last 24 hours. Try to list as many texts as you can think of, no matter how short and unimportant they might seem (e.g., dosage instructions on a medicine bottle, social media posts, a newspaper article, product assembly instructions…). Now, answer the following questions.

  • What was your purpose in reading each of those texts? Did you read for information for an academic assignment, enjoyment, deciding on a product you wanted to buy, etc.? Or, did you read to figure out some complex problem that keeps you awake at night?
  • How did each of those purposes influence your reading strategies? Did you take notes or try to memorize what you read? How long did it take you to read different texts? Did you begin at the beginning and read until you reached the end, or did you browse some texts? Consider the time of day you were reading. Consider even whether some texts tired you out or whether you thought they were “boring.” Why?
  • What did you do with the results of your reading? Did you use them for to buy a new product or find directions, or did you use them to understand some topic better or learn something about yourself and/or others?

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:

decorative imageReading 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.

 

initial learning activity

Read three short articles on multitasking:

Apply critical reading strategies as you read and re-read.  Remember that critical reading is essentially creating a dialogue with the text, so jot down your reactions, ideas, questions, comparisons of texts, and personal examples.

After you have read each article critically, summarize each article.

Finally, write a short reaction to the articles’ concepts (2-3 pages), offering your opinions on multitasking based on your own experience.

Submit:

  1. Your dialogue with one of the articles, showing your application of critical reading strategies. You may do this in many different ways.  You may want to cut and paste the article’s text into a word document and then annotate in a different color text.  You may want to just submit your notes, making sure to identify the sentences/paragraphs that correlate with each note.  You may want to do a chart, or a visual as your dialogue. However you complete this part of the learning activity, make sure to be very clear which article you’re responding to at which point.
  2. Three summaries, one for each article.  Note that summaries, by their nature, are short (a few sentences each).
  3. Your reaction to the articles’ concepts.

 

in-depth learning activity

Read three short articles on multitasking:

Apply critical reading strategies as you read and re-read.  Remember that critical reading is essentially creating a dialogue with the text, so jot down your reactions, ideas, questions, comparisons of texts, and personal examples.

After you have read each article critically, summarize each article.

Then view the following video on critical thinking and reading.

Write a short essay (5-7 pages) analyzing the information in each article.  Include the following points in your analysis:

  • Who is the intended audience for each article?
  • What is each author’s claim (main assertion) and purpose (intended effect on you as a reader)?
  • What tone did each author use, and what effect does tone have on the article’s purpose and message?
  • What is the quality of evidence in each article?  What types of sources does each author refer to, to support his claim?
  • What effect does the amount of evidence have on your acceptance or rejection of the message?  Do you need more or less evidence to accept the author’s ideas, and if so, of what type?
  • What experiences of your own did the article’s information relate to?  How does your own experience help you accept or reject the author’s claim?
  • Overall, based on these points of analysis, which article do you accept most fully? Note that you may want to answer this question early on and use it as your own claim to focus your essay.

Submit your essay, which—in addition to addressing the points of analysis—should incorporate your three summaries.

FYI

The learning activities on this page use articles published in general publications and written for audiences without a lot of background in psychology or brain studies.

If you were researching this topic for an academic purpose, you would use articles from scholarly journals or peer-reviewed sources, articles that may present original research as opposed to reporting someone else’s research.  For comparison, you can access the following scholarly article, “Deficit in switching between functional brain networks underlies the impact of multitasking on working memory in older adults,” from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The article is available full text in the ESC library.

Even if your studies are not focused in this field, try to read this article in order to assess your critical reading skills on a more advanced level (or else find and read an article in a professional journal in your field).

  • Can you read it for some understanding?
  • Can you articulate the article’s main idea?
  • Can you interact and create a dialogue with the article’s text?
  • Can you formulate your own ideas based on your reading of this article?

Critically reading a scholarly article should provide more insight into your critical reading skills at college and professional levels.

Interested in learning more about critical reading?

You may be interested in the following courses:

  • Introduction to College Reading and Writing
  • Introduction to Critical Thinking
  • any advanced-level course that is reading and writing intensive

Related college Learning Goals

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Evaluate, analyze, synthesize and critique key concepts and experiences, and apply diverse perspectives to find creative solutions to problems concerning human behavior, society and the natural world.

Information and Digital Media Literacy: Critically access, evaluate, understand, create and share information using a range of collaborative technologies to advance learning, as well as personal and professional development.

 

For more information, see the College Learning Goals Policy.