Reading Mindfully to Write

1. Reading Mindfully to Write Owning the material Adapted from Reading Analytically 6th ed. Chapter 5, by D. Rosenwasser and J. Stephen.

2. Common Points of View Which describes you?

3. Language defines our reality • Words mean different things to different people • We understand the world through the language we use to describe it and to interact within it • Need to join the conversation while you read

4. Read to become conversant • Analyze using one or some of the techniques described in Nosich (or use analytical tools of other authors, e.g., Writing Analytically by Rosenwasser and Stephen) • Need to understand enough to talk about what you read and to answer questions • Delve into questions the material asks and questions that you ask of the material • Move actively rather than passively through the reading to own it and to attain real knowledge

5. Reading actively • Learn the vocabulary and jargon • Realize that reading is a physical and a mental activity • Good reading is slow reading • Read to understand, not to react • Interpret the material through the eyes of the author • Complete an elements of reasoning analysis • Analyze your impediments in light of your analysis

6. Situate the material rhetorically • The purpose: what the author wants you to believe • The complaint: what the author is concerned with, the question(s) an author tries to answer • Context : the situation or environment in which the material operates • Consider your context and impediments that influence your analysis (consider alternative analyses)

7. Suspend judgment • Resist natural tendency to critique • Read with the grain initially • Seek to understand material on its own merits • Note words like “but” and “however” • Note strings and binaries (words and ideas that tend to repeat)

8. Reading against the grain • Need to approach asking • How is the material presented? • Why is it presented this way? • Read to uncover “what the material seems to be trying to communicate consciously” = reading with the grain • Ask “what does the material communicate unconsciously?”= reading against the grain • Challenge the author(s)

9. Reading against the grain (cont’d.) • Analyze rhetorical presentation • Order of information of main points • Deductive vs. inductive structure • Note specific words used to influence or “lead” the reader, e.g., “most students averaged a deplorable 62% on X. . . .” vs. “a 62% on X….” • Apply a lens; read from a specific point of view, e.g., economists and environmentalists would interpret items in the same reading quite differently.