2 How to Read the Textbook
This document is about how to read critically. Every piece of writing, no matter how simple, aims to convince its audience. It wants something from you: maybe something benevolent, maybe not. A wise reader needs not only to understand what the author is saying, but what he or she wants to accomplish. This requires reading closely, with an awareness of your own thought processes as you read, and an enhanced consideration of the writer’s goals and strategy. Such skill will serve you well every time you read an advertisement, listen to a political speech, follow the news, or even just watch a TV drama. It is also especially important in history, where we must read documents from and about many different kinds of people and places.
In this course, we’ll be reading two very different types of writing: academic writing, such as articles, textbooks or other secondary material that is written in a modern style, and historical documents, which may be written in older, unfamiliar styles. This document applies to academic writing.
It presents habits of mind (and eye and hand) you can develop to better comprehend an author’s communication, purpose, and context.
Looking for Cues
The first step in critical reading is to understand the author’s words and ideas: the signal they are trying to transmit. Fortunately, most authors want you to understand them, and accordingly they have encoded their ideas in a structure that offers cues, visual or verbal, intended to orient you.
Visual Cues
Modern academic and popular writing, such as your textbook, includes lots of visual cues. Almost all printed books today have titles, headings, and subheadings. Look at your textbook. Some parts of it are written in bigger, bolder letters. The size (and maybe color) of these headings is usually hierarchical: the more important titles are bigger, and the less important stuff is smaller. If you subtract all the regular text, and just leave these headings, you’ll have an outline. This outline will give you important clues about how the author has organized their thoughts. As you read, keep track of where you are in the outline and how the part you’re reading now connects to other parts of the writing.
Structural Cues
In addition to graphic and design elements, modern non-fiction has developed certain conventions. Many familiar elements of writing that you know from English class are (ultimately) aids and cues, letting you know where they are in the author’s overall argument. They are the verbal equivalent of visual cues, such as titles, headings and introductions.
Introductions and Conclusions: Most chapters (and articles) have a paragraph at the beginning that summarizes the whole argument, before it is presented, and end in a paragraph that sums everything up. These paragraphs serve as sign-posts: the introduction lets you know what’s coming. The conclusion helps you remember what has come before. You may also see mini-introductions and mini-conclusions i