Critical Reading

The author outlines critical reading as a very comprehensive series of actions to understand and evaluate a piece of writing. The first step was to outline the basic things about the piece that didn't require actually reading it. This means drawing meaning and context clues from the title, knowledge of the author, and the time and place the piece of writing was formed in. Next you actually read the piece, but you view it in its entirety and only examine it from a very broad perspective. During this you can annotate the reading and ask questions about things and draw emphasis to important things. It is then necessary to analyze the piece through inference, synthesis, and evaluation. Finally we should look for meaning and use things like language and writing strategy to understand this meaning.