Lesson 1: Critical Reading and Summary Writing—Foundations for Course Success
The Reading and Writing Connection
In Advanced Placement Language and Composition, your success will be determined as much by your ability to read skillfully as by your ability to write skillfully. The two skills are generally inseparable because most of the writing you will be doing in both your college undergraduate and graduate programs, and in the workplace thereafter, will involve writing using many different sources of information. It is impossible to write well about sources that you haven’t read carefully and don’t understand—although I have had my share of students who have made valiant attempts! You may have “been there, done that” a time or two yourself. The point of this course, then, is not only to teach you to produce successful academic writing, but also to help you acquire reading skills that will serve you well both in school and for the rest of your life.
Pre-reading strategies
What is it that skilled college readers do differently from others? In Lesson 1, we will focus on the first element of skillful reading: engaging in pre-reading strategies. Instead of jumping into the reading, a skilled reader tries to establish a context and a purpose for reading before beginning. Skilled readers find out who the author is, and what authority that writer has on the topic. Often that information can be found in a head note at the beginning of the article. Good readers note when and where the article was published: some sources are more credible than others, and the timeliness of an article can be important, especially in the sciences where information changes rapidly.
Good readers survey the reading landscape. They read the introduction to get a sense of where the writer is going. They look over the article for boldface headings and subheadings that give insight into how the content is organized. They check the ending for summary notes. If the article appears in a high school or college textbook, good readers check to see if there are study questions following the article, and they use those questions to focus their reading. Knowing in advance what information they are looking for enables them to use their reading time more efficiently.
Building reading strategies
For this course, I will do my part to help you establish a context and purpose for each reading assignment. The discussion for each reading will begin by explaining who the author is and how the text fits into the lesson. The Reading Outcomes will state what you should know and be able to do by the time you have finished the selection. The Questions on Content are designed to prompt your thinking about the information presented in the article: What arguments are presented? What evidence is offered? How persuasive is it? What details are presented? What is their significance? The Questions on Craft ask you to think about the writing strategies the author has used to convey the message. To respond to these questions, you need to read the selection as a writer, observing the ways the author is using the resources of language to accomplish his or her aims. Read through the reading discussion and begin to consider all these questions carefully before you begin to read the article itself.
The most important factor distinguishing the “best from the rest” in reading is that skilled readers assume that they will read a text more than once. You should review the Reading Objectives, Questions on Content, and Questions on Craft again after your first reading of the text. Do the questions have more meaning for you now? What issues will you particularly look for on your second time through? Now, re-read the selection with these questions in mind.
I recommend that you annotate your text during this second reading. This means circling or underlining key points, and writing notes and questions in the margins. The following are particular elements you should look for and mark:
- The thesis, if it is stated
- The author’s main points
- Evidence or examples that the writer uses to support the thesis and main points
- Key terms or concepts
- Central issues or themes
- Questions about ideas in the text
- Places where you disagree with the author
- Anything you don’t understand, or that you find confusing or unclear
- Connections you find with other readings or with information that they posses
If there are words you don’t know, make sure to circle them. When you have finished reading, look them up. This is a critical way to develop your vocabulary skills. Often it is these kinds of words that you will find in the vocabulary section of the SAT. More important, a broad knowledge of words makes reading and writing and speaking tasks easier. Make friends with unfamiliar words.
After you have finished reading the selection twice and annotating it, you should be able to answer the questions on content and on craft. If you can’t answer a question, you need to go back to the text and reread the parts that pertain to the question. If you are still stuck, this is a question you might want to raise with your instructor.
Writing a Summary
In this lesson you will learn how to write an effective summary of a source. Skillful summarizing of a source is a building block for nearly all academic writing. To write an effective summary, you have to be able to accurately restate in clear, concise, original language the information contained in a source. You may find that writing an effective summary is not as easy as it sounds. We’ll look at summary writing more closely after we have read the selection for this lesson.
