Critical Essay Writing Critical Reading

Critical Essay Writing: Critical Reading

Students can often be resistant to learning the process of critical reading. By offering examples and allowing students to freely voice their own opinions, the instructor can encourage them to view reading as a continuous, sometimes even fun, learning process. With this in mind, the following lessons will offer strategies and guidelines for helping students to consider reading in both an academic and non-academic light.

The Critical Reader

Although many students express an active disinterest in reading, reflect for a minute about anything you’ve enjoyed reading in the past. Note than this can include newspapers, magazines, online materials, etc. Now, consider how you read. Do you like to skim quickly through the sentences? Do you take the time to sit and read the writing as a whole?

Although many students believe that they do not need to have reading skills once they leave college, just about every job requires that the employee have critical reading skills. For example, potential careers could involve reading anything from market reports to medical advisories to technical research. Developing critical reading skills now can give you a sizeable advantage when you enter the working world.

Critical Essays Tasks

Critical readers in any field need to perform four essential tasks.

1. The first task involves distinguishing facts from opinions. Now that you’re dedicated to becoming a critical reader, you need to understand when authors are offering their own opinions or when they are giving established facts. As you read an article or essay, take the time to identify when opinions are being offered and then whether these opinions are valid. If the writer is an authority on the subject, then you can accept that writer’s interpretation of facts. However, if it is unclear who is offering the opinion or whether the opinion is clearly supported with evidence, you need to reconsider the validity of the information.
2. The second task involves making inferences. Basically, readers make inferences when they draw conclusions based on what a passage’s information “suggests” rather than on what it states. When you make inferences, looking at the evidence is again important. Make sure that you distinguish what you are feeling about the text from what the author is actually saying about the subject.
3. The third task consists of synthesizing information. You have already had practice synthesizing information in many of your previous classes. Basically, synthesizing information involves relating new information to what you already know. Synthesizing information can be very useful in helping you to look at a subject in a new way.
4. The fourth task consists of evaluating quality. You have already seen how important it is to look at the evidence in the text, and when you evaluate quality, you determine the accuracy of the information.