Critical Reading Books Pdf

[Teena Ruiter]

Aftercompleting a book, the reader should know the basic thesis of the book as well as the intricacies of the argument. Evaluate the notes you took while reading and record your reactions to the book as a whole. If possible, compare the book to others on the same topic.

Read the Preface. Often, an author uses the preface to include any important information about the book that would interfere with the structure of the book were this information to be included in the chapters. Note: not all prefaces will cover this material.

Always read the Introduction or Preface to the book. Here, the author often states the main message of the book, along with situating the book within the historical dialogue and stating the intended audience.

Record your thoughts. Write down the answers to the questions you asked during the reading and your reactions to the material. Take notes, but do not write in library books. If you do not own the book, make use of sticky notes, flags, or a writing journal. If the book is yours, make liberal use of underlining and marginal notes.

Because of my reading habits, it was always very important for me to have quiet surroundings when I was working my way through books, articles, essays, and so forth. I was particularly deliberate when reading poetry, because I felt then, and still feel to this day, that to fully appreciate a good poem, one needs to go over it again and again to ruminate and savor not only its meaning, but also its sounds and rhythms. That is the approach I use in my Chinese Poetry and Prose class, which I offer every third year, and whose current iteration began today. We spend more than two weeks on a single poem by the Tang poet, Wang Wei, called "Deer Park / Enclosure", which consists of twenty syllables. I may ask my students to keep a journal of their growing awareness of what the poem is actually telling us (in my forty years of teaching, I've never asked students to keep a journal about anything, but it might be worth doing in this class).

I was already an avid reader, but I read more that ever on my Kindle. One has access to an almost limitless number of free digital books and can carry that library around in one's back pocket. Furthermore, unlike a tablet computer, it's device designed primarily for reading and is difficult to use for other purposes (playing videogames, browsing the web, reading emails etc.) so digital distraction is not really an issue.

I suspect the divide between digital reading and print reading is far less profound than the divide between reading and the reliance on memory, which was so memorably discussed in Plato's Phaedrus.

Back in secondary school, my Swedish teacher told us that it was important to read rapidly because it, allegedly, improved comprehension as well as saved time. I don't think she ever specified how rapidly you were supposed to read, and I certainly didn't come away with any strong impression whether she thought I read fast enough.

Regarding changes in reading in digital age, I certainly read less books now than in the pre-iPad age, but that may be more to do with now having a job and a wife than any digital distractions. Switching from exclusively paper books to doing much of my reading on an e-ink e-reader has probably reduced the decline, since it's easier to bring along than most physical books.

After carefully reading the quoted article three more times, my understanding of the text is that "about 6000 years ago, our ancestors already had some circuitry in their brains that gave them the ability to count, among other things, and that, over time, this developed into the circuits that allowed the later development of literacy".

Wolf later seems to explain that this circuitry, already available in the human brain , becomes more powerful in individuals who regularly read in a studious and critical manner, and that a change in habit to more brief and more superficial manner of reading reduces the development of this circuitry. It seems to be like a muscle, that gets stronger as it is exercised more.

I did my university study by distance learning, and have read so many journal articles on tablets, phones and laptops that when I now have to read anything similar on paper, I find myself trying to scroll up when I reach the bottom of the page.

When I have to read academic literature on paper, I don't notice any difficulty in concentrating, possibly just because for me digital media are now strongly associated with academic study reading. I would be interested to know if this is common to distance learners in the digital age. I do, when reading articles on paper, very much miss conveniences such as font size ajustability, multimedia annotation and, most of all, the search function.

On the other hand, while reading for study (digital or paper), I have always taken notes longhand, in a smart black notebook. So I guess a new kind of literacy augments, rather than replaces, the existing practice.

To what extent does the specific technology impact the reading experience, I wonder? The Kindle, when it was launched, made a big thing out of its e ink (not the exact name) which was supposed to be better for comfortable reading of long form prose than any other screen. Is there a difference in the brains of Kindle readers vs iPad users?

Homer was illiterate and so were the ancient India epic poets. Even Panini, the world's first grammarian, did not rely on writing to transmit his extremely concise and extraordinarily precise rules. Indeed, although Indians were aware of writing from the west during the first millennium BC, they rejected it as a technology that they felt would diminish people's ability to store information and literature in their own mind. I suspect that this deeply grounded respect for memorization skills has something to do with the fact that youths of Indian descent are so highly successful in the spelling bees in America, an uncanny phenomenon that we've addressed many times on Language Log.

A thought-provoking, memory-reviving post. My first job after college, 46 years ago, was to teach a reading and study skills program developed by a mom-and-pop company. Speed reading was one of the proffered techniques; we didn't flog it, but let the students decide for themselves how useful it was and in what contexts. The centerpiece was "phrase reading", which encouraged the students to focus visually and mentally on semantic units (phrases or short sentences) rather than individual words, as a way of promoting comprehension and increasing reading speed. This was especially helpful for delayed students who were used to trying to decode texts one word at a time, but was a good refresher for everyone. The other techniques that I recall were scanning, to find a particular piece of information or to get an overview of the text preliminary to a closer reading, and questioning, where the goal was to consciously generate a flow of questions as one read, to develop an interactive relationship with the text and aid close reading. The texts were all taken from the students' actual coursework. Students timed and graded their own exercises and graphed the results, which gave them tangible evidence of progress and provided useful insights, for example, about the (often inverse) relationship between reading speed and comprehension. It seemed to work well then, and, mirabile dictu, the company still exists.

"To what extent does the specific technology impact the reading experience, I wonder? The Kindle, when it was launched, made a big thing out of its e ink (not the exact name) which was supposed to be better for comfortable reading of long form prose than any other screen. Is there a difference in the brains of Kindle readers vs iPad users?"

I'm not sure there's any reason there would be. The difference here is in projective displays vs. reflective displays. Most monitors, televisions, and just electronic devices in general display images by emitting light; they project it out, which is why they tend to cause eye strain over prolonged periods of time. An electronic ink display like a Kindle, however, doesn't emit anything. It's a surface embedded with small spheres colored black on one side and neutral on the other that are magnetically reoriented and then fixed in place to form an image, which can then be read or viewed just as though it was standard print via reflected environmental light, with no light actually produced by the display itself.

Reflective displays like this are no different physically than reading any other printed text on a surface; the reason they're more comfortable to read is purely because they don't emit light. So there wouldn't be any difference neurologically between the visual stimulus of reading a Kindle and reading a sheet of paper.

(Of course, if you have an electronic ink display with a backlight, that negates all the eye strain benefit the same as it would if you used one of those book lights that sends light up through a page.)

A quote I use in my course on critical thinking relates to the importance of incorporating information into your thought processes:

A man may hear a 1000 lectures and read a 1000 volumes, and be at the end of the process very much where he was, as regards knowledge.

It must not be passively received, but actually and actively entered into, embraced, mastered. The mind must go half-way to meet what comes to it from without.

-John Henry Newman, (1852) The Idea of a University (English prelate and theologian)

Isn't epic nowadays often seen as a typical product of early literacy? The Iliad and the Odyssey are said to be each about twice the length of the longest attested oral epic. Wouldn't you need some kind of notation to do that?

Following @victormair on oral vs. literate traditions, I observe that Maryanne Wolf credits the "reading brain" with many cognitive functions which would have developed prior to the shift to literacy. (Or, for that matter, which in child development precede the acquisition of literacy). Thus, Wolfe's focus should be narrowed to the implications for cognitive functions (broadly defined) of the shift toward "The Screen" as predominant/exclusive source.

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