When you think back to imagining your experience with parallel parking in an unfamiliar city, you might also consider that it would become easier after more practice.  You’ll become more skilled at searching for a spot, actually parallel parking, reading the meter, or noticing certain signs because you had prior experience.  As you practice critical reading, you’ll become more skilled at it, and it will become easier to you!

• Active reading requires focus and effort, and you may have to look up words or concepts.  You may have to read complicated sentences several times, and it’s recommended that you take notes of your thoughts and questions while reading.
• Some strategies for reading scholarly articles include skimming and scanning, reading the abstract, questioning and annotating, and reading the references.  Being familiar with the IMRaD format (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) is also helpful when approaching a scientific or social-scientific essay.
• Strategies for reading a scientific paper include reading the sections in a different order than they’re presented, taking notes, reading it multiple times, and looking up other papers in order to understand some of the details.
• Technical documents generally refer to papers that fall into scientific or mathematical categories, such as lab reports or product proposals, and it’s helpful to start by recognizing the layout, reading through headings, looking up unfamiliar terms, and staying in context.
• Visual data are meant to be “read,” just like text on a page. Images with data often contain crucial information that isn’t available elsewhere in a text.
• A genre represents a pattern or set of rules that a given text follows in order to communicate its message effectively to its intended audience.  The key to understanding a genre is first to understand its purpose. Each genre sets out to accomplish something specific, and academic writing has its own subset of genres.
• Medium is the means by which the information is communicated. What this means for critical reading is that, when interpreting a message, we need to consider how that message got to us and which interpretive frameworks we’re using to understand it.
• When you summarize, you use your own words to condense a text in a way that preserves its original meaning.  Analysis is the process of methodically breaking something down to gain a better understanding of it and also includes the ability to connect pieces of information as the basis for generalization or explanation.
• Rhetorical analysis is when you analyze how a text might speak meaningfully to an audience and, ultimately, achieve a purpose.  Asking “What is this text trying to do or achieve? How does it accomplish its goals (or fail to accomplish its goals)?” are helpful questions for this practice.
• While rhetorical analysis emphasizes the relationship between the author, context, and reader, critical analysis starts from the elements of the text itself.  Close reading focuses on significant details or patterns in a text. To examine a text closely, you should annotate your experience, take notice, and look for small details.