Chapter 1 Reading for Writing-Final

Chapter 1 Reading for Writing

Text-Based & Reading-Related Writing

Whether on campus or at the workplace, you skill in identifying main ideas and their support through reading and then commenting on them in writing will serve you well. The writing you will do in this chapter is commonly called text-based. A similar form is reading -related writing, which uses sources for ideas and pattern but has less focus on reading content.

Text-based writing includes:

1. Reading effectively (which may include underlining, annotating, and outlining).

2. Writing a summary (main ideas in your own words).

3. Writing a reaction (usually a statement of how the reading relates specifically to you, your experiences, and you attitudes but also can be a critique, involving the worth and logic of a piece).

4. Writing a two-part response (both a summary and reaction, although they are separate).

5. Documenting (giving credit to sources you use).

These Kinds of text-based writing have certain points in common; they all:

1. Originate as a response to something you have read.

2. Indicate, to some degree, content from that piece.

3. Demonstrate your knowledge of that piece.

Underlining, annotating, and outlining will give you practice in reading analytically and in recording the main ideas and their support in a clear, direct manner.

Underlining

Imagine you are reading a chapter of several pages and you decide to underline and write in the margins. Immediately, the underlining takes you out of the passive, television watching frame of mind. You are involved. You are participating. It is now necessary for you to discriminate, to distinguish more important from less important ideas. Perhaps you have thought of underlining as a method designed only to help you with reviewing. That is, when you study the material the next time, you will not have to reread all of it; instead, you can review only the most important, underlined parts. However, even while you are underlining, you are benefiting from an imposed concentration, because this procedure forces you to think, to focus. Consider the following guidelines for underlining:

The following rules will guide you in writing effective summaries.

1. Underline the main ideas in paragraphs. The most important statement, the topic sentence, is likely to be at the beginning of the paragraph.

2. Underline the support for those main ideas.

3. Underline answers to questions that you bring to the reading assignment. These questions may have come from the end of the chapter, from subheadings that you turn into questions, or from your independent concerns about the topic.

4. Underline only the key words. You would seldom underline all the words in a sentence and almost never a whole paragraph.

Most Students, in their enthusiasm to do a good job, overdo underlining. The trick is to figure out what to underline. you would seldom underline more than about 30 percent of a passage, although the amount would depend on your purpose and the nature of the material.

Annotating

Annotating, writing notes in the margins, is a practice related to underlining. You can do it independently, although it usually appears in conjunction with underlining to record your understanding and to extend your involvement tin your reading.

Writing in the margins represents intense involvement because it turns a reader into a writer. If you read material and write something in the margin as a reaction to it, then in a way you have had a conversation with the author. The author has made a statement and you have responded. In fact, you may have added something to the text; therefore, for your purpose you have become a co-author or collaborator the comments you make in the margin are of your own choosing according to your interests and the purpose you bring to the reading assignment. Your response in the margin may merely echo the author's ideas, it may question them critically, it may relate them to something else, or it may add to them.

The comments and marks on the following essay will help you understand the connection between writing and reading. Both techniques-underlining to indicate main and supporting Ideas and annotating to indicate their importance and relevance to the task at hand-will enhance thinking, reading and writing.

Outlining

After reading, underlining, and annotating the piece, the next step could be outlining. If the piece is well organized, you should be able to reduce it to a simple outline so that you can, at a glance, see the relationship of ideas (sequences, relative importance, and interdependence).

The essay on total institutions can be outlined very easily:

Total institutions
I. Common characteristics
A. All activities in the same setting
B. All phases of life within a larger group
C. Activities scheduled according to a master plan
1. Bureaucratic society
2. Social distance between inmates and staff

II. Adjusting to the world inside
A. Individual depersonalized
1. Wears uniform
2. No personal belongings
3. No privacy
B. Adaptation
1. Negative
a. Psychosis
b. Regression
c. Depression
2. Positive

III. Problems upon release outside
A. Adjusting to a different system
B. Encountering shock of going to the bottom of a new order

Types of Writing

Personal Narrative

Some of the student and professional reading selections in this book will be of a personal nature. Often it will be in a narrative (story) Form and may include opinion. Mastering this kind of personal writing is important because you have accumulated many valuable and interesting experiences.

Analytical and Text-Based Writing

Many more college writing tasks, however, will require you to evaluate andreflect on ideas. These ideas may come from what you have learned collectively. They may also come from reading. Often you will be expected to read, to think, and to write critically. These reading-related writing assignments will direct you to respond in the principal forms of text-based writing: the summary and the reaction (evaluation, analysis, interpretation), which may be combined for a two-part response to distinguish each part. All three are forms of text-based writing. Think of text-based writing as responding, in detail with direct references and quotations to what you have read and giving credit to the author(s) of that material. Such a process of reading and writing demonstrates your understanding of your source(s) and is the essence of critical thinking.

Writing a Summary

A summary is a re written, shortened version of a piece of writing in which you use your own wording to express the main ideas. Learning to summarize effectively will help you in many ways. Summary writing reinforces comprehension skills in reading. It requires you to discriminate among the idea in the target reading passage. Summarizes are usually written in the form of a well-designed paragraph or set of paragraphs. Frequently, they are used in collecting material for research papers and in writing conclusions to essays.

The following rules will guide you in writing effective summaries.

1. Cite the author and title of the text.

2. Reduce the length of the original by about two-thirds, although the exact reduction will vary, depending on the content of the original.

3. Concentrate on the main ideas and include details only infrequently.

4. Change the original wording without changing the idea.

5. Do not evaluate the content or give an opinion in any way (even if you see an error in logic or fact).

6. Do not add ideas (even if you have an abundance of related information).

7. Do not include any personal comments (that is, do not use I, referring to self).

8. Use quotation only infrequently. (If you do use quotation, however, enclose them in quotation marks.)

9. Use some author tags ("says York," "according to York" or "the author explains") to remind the reader(s) that you are summarizing the material of another author.

Source: Brandon, Lee. Brandon, Kelly. Paragraphs and Essays with Integrated Readings, eleventh Edition. Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2011