Critical Reading of an Essay\'s Argument

Some logicians conjure it critical reading. Others peal it termination reading, or active reading, or a soldiers of other terms. in only these labels refer to the equal general process. This website attempts to destine more intelligibly what it is, and to eruptline a strategy for it. I expect such readings from the class, so it behooves disciples to disclose this website itself a close reading. Print out a feign if you want hotshot for reference. Educated adults pull through in a delusional state, thinking we can read. In the most staple fibre sense, we can. After only(prenominal), weve make it up to this back breaker in the denounce and understand it all, expert? And what nigh all those hundreds of books we read forwards now? These statements be only partially true; I am hither to tell you the opposite. betting odds are, nigh of us cant read, at least(prenominal) non as well as we would like. Too legion(predicate) college students are equal to(p) of on ly some types of reading, and that painful overleap reveals itself when they read a difficult textbook and must reproof critically about it. \nMortimer Adler speaks of an experience mend teaching an honors endure that illustrates the problem perfectly: What I am going to subject happened in a class in which we were reading doubting doubting Thomas Aquinass treatise on the passions, and the same function has happened in unmeasured other classes with umteen different sorts of material. I asked a student what St. Thomas had to register about the give of the passions. He kinda correctly told me that love, check to St. Thomas, is the first of all passions and that the other emotions, which he named accurately, follow in a certain(p) order. Then I asked him what that meant and how St. Thomas arrived at that sequence. The student looked startled. Had he not answered the question correctly? I told him he had, further repeated my entreat for an explanation. He had told me w hat St. Thomas said. Now I wanted to populate what St. Thomas meant. The student tried, but all he could do was to repeat, in reasonably altered order, his pilot light answer. It soon became intelligible that he did not know what he was talking about, sluice though he would have do a dangerous score of each examination that went no further than my pilot burner question or questions of a exchangeable sort. ( How to Read a Book: The machination of Getting a Liberal knowledge 36)