Critical Reading Skills & Techniques

Critical Reading

• Critical reading involves evaluating claims, seeking definitions, judging information, demanding proof, and questioning assumptions
• Reading critically means thinking critically.
• Critical reading helps uncover an author's views, raise questions, assess the strengths and weaknesses of arguments, and decide whether to agree or disagree.
• Becoming a critical and active reader is essential for sufficient text interpretation.

Techniques to Develop Skills

• Keeping a reading journal involves writing feelings and ideas in reaction to a reading assignment.
• This process allows for developing impressions of a text and connecting them to personal experiences, enhancing essay relation and comprehension.
• Annotating a text means making notes on a copy of the reading.
• Annotation includes highlighting, underlining, and writing notes, comments, questions, and reactions in the margins.
• Annotating facilitates a dialogue with the author, moving beyond passive reading.
• Outlining a text involves locating the thesis statement, claims, and evidence, then plotting them into an outline.
• Outlining reveals a writer's structure, sequences, and how they connect ideas, aiding in better evaluation of the writing's quality.
• Summarizing involves extracting the main points of an essay and its important supporting details.
• Summarization improves reading comprehension by discerning major and minor points in the text.
• Questioning the text involves asking specific questions about skeptical points, topics that diverge from expectations or views.
• Consider things found impressive.

Skills Needed in Critical Reading

• Critical reading means being able to distinguish information that is clearly stated (explicit) from information that is suggested (implicit).
• Defining Claims involves identifying the writer's point or position on a chosen topic.
• The writer's point is known as the claim, or the central argument or thesis statement of the text.
• The claim is proven by providing details, explanations, and evidence.
• A claim should be argumentative and debatable.
• Good claims are specific, focused, interesting, and engaging.

Types of Claims

• Claims of facts state a quantifiable assertion or a measurable topic.
• These claims state that something has existed, exists, or will exist based on data.
• Claims of value consist of arguments about moral, philosophical, or aesthetic topics
• These claims attempt to show that some values are more or less desirable than others.
• Judgements are made on what should be valued

Identifying the Context of a Text

• Being critical involves understanding that texts are developed with a specific context
• Context includes social, cultural, political, historical, and related circumstances surrounding the text.
• Intertextuality is the modeling of a text's meaning through connections in language, images, characters, themes, or subjects.

Critical Reading as Reasoning

• Assertions are declarative sentences that claim something is true, and are either true or false.
• Common Types of Assertions are determined by certainty

Common Types of Assertions

• Facts are statements that can be proven objectively through direct experience, testimonies, verified observation, or research results.
• Conventions are ways in which something is done, similar to traditions and norms that depend on historical precedent, laws, rules, usage, and customs.
• Opinions are based on facts, but are difficult to objectively verify because of the uncertainty of producing satisfactory proofs of soundness.
• Preferences are based on personal choice and can't be objectively proven or logically attacked because they are subjective.
• Counterclaims are claims made to rebut a previous claim, providing a contrasting perspective to the main argument.
• Evidence includes facts and statistics, opinions from experts, and personal anecdotes, given to support a claim.
• Unified, relevant, specific, accurate, and representative evidence is good evidence.

Citation Styles

• MLA (Modern Language Association) emphasizes authorship.
• Designed for ease of presentation, for Humanities, Literature, Languages, Arts, and Philosophy.
• APA (American Psychological Association) emphasizes the date of publication and is for the social sciences, including Psychology, Education, Sociology, and Business.
• APA format designed for a social sciences format.

Citations

• MLA includes the author's name, publication city and year, publisher, and publication medium.
• APA includes the author's name, publication year, work title, publication city, and publisher.
• In-text citations acknowledge and credit sources.
• In-text citations indicate the origin of information or ideas, including author's last name and year of publication, enclosed in parentheses
• Reference citations appear at the end of a paper, with complete source details.
• All in-text citations for MLA and APA must include the author's name.
• MLA uses a "Bibliography" section, while APA uses a "Reference Page"

MLA Book Citation

• Lastname, Firstname. Title of Work. City of Pub: Publisher, Year. Medium.

APA Book Citation

• Lastname, First Initial. (Year). Title of work. City of Pub, State: Publisher.

MLA Article Citation

• Lastname, Firstname. "Title of Work." Journal Title Volume.Issue (Year):page numbers. Medium.

APA Article Citation

• Lastname, First Initial. (Year). Title of work. Journal Title, Volume(Issue), page numbers.

MLA Online Source Citation

• Author. Title of Site. Sponsor, Date created (use n.d. if not given). Medium. Date accessed. <URL (optional)/>.

APA Online Source Citation

• Author. (Year, Month[use n.d. if not given]). Article or page sub-title. Major Publication Title, volume or issue number (if available). Retrieved from http://url.