You Are What You
Read
Effective Strategies to be an Excellent Reader
Building Your Reader
Experience
• Take stock of what you already know
• Read everything you like and even
things you don’t like
• Talk to others about what you read
• Read your own writing
• Read text at least twice
Context
• Context: the time period and place that
a text was written or created and the
situation, the circumstances,
surrounding it’s creation and it’s
reading.
• Before you can understand theme or
purpose you must understand context.
Text Annotation
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Annotating a text means to mark pages
with notes. It is an ESSENTIAL strategy to
get the most of college level reading.
Annotations make it easy to find important
information quickly when reviewing a text.
Annotations help with familiarizing you with
the content and organization of a text.
Annotations provides a way to engage with
main ideas.
Well Annotated Text
Will:
• clearly identify where important main
ideas are located in the text.
• express the main ideas
• trace development of ideas/arguments
throughout the text
• introduce reader’s thoughts and
reactions
Four Ways to Annotate
• Highlight/Underline- mark words,
phrases or main ideas. These
highlighted or underlined ideas help with
providing quotes or citations to be used
when writing about a text.
• Paraphrase/Summarize- while reading
make notes in the margins of the main
ideas of each paragraph or page. This
too will help with writing about the text.
Four Ways to Annotate
• Comments/Responses- note your own
reactions to the text.
• Mark in the margins if you agree or
disagree with certain ideas.
• Question certain arguments, ideas or
evidence.
• Relate your own personal experience
• Make connections between one text and
another.
Four Ways to Annotate:
Descriptive Outline
• A descriptive outline will focus on the
organization and purpose of a text.
• A descriptive outline will identify the
following: major arguments or main
ideas, examples, facts, counter
arguments, transitions and conclusion.
Rhetoric: The art of
Persuasion
• Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty
of observing in any given case the
available means of persuasion”
• Rhetoric can also be defined as “ the
way people produce texts to create and
communicate meaning.”
• Define “Rhetoric” in your own words!!!!
Reader’s Rhetorical
Triangle
• The Reader’s Rhetorical Triangle
illustrates the various roles involved in
effective communication.
This Is How We Do It:
Modes
of
Discourse
• There are four major modes or methods
of academic writing: Narration,
Exposition, Description, and
Argumentation/Persuasion
• Each mode serves an intended purpose:
to describe, to inform, to explain and to
persuade
• Name examples for each mode and
purpose
This Is How We Do It:
• Rhetorical
There are various ways
a writer/speaker
Strategy
will approach and organize a topic:
comparison/contrast, exemplification,
classification/division, description,
definition, narration or process/analysis.
• The strategy should be the most
effective method to accomplish one’s
purpose.
• Connect strategies to intended purposes
It:
Rhetorical
Devices
• The tools used to convey the message:
figurative language, Rhetorical
Question, and The Appeals(ethos,
logos,pathos)
• Ethical Appeal(ethos)- using one’s
credibility such as morals/values,
religion, title, status or culture to create a
good impression
• Logical Appeal(logos)- using concrete
evidence: facts, statistics and case
studies and Rhetorical Question to
• Emotional Appeal(pathos)- evoking
sympathy from the reader. The most
effective ways are loaded words,
imagery, anecdotes, examples and
figurative language
• Which device do you think is the most
effective? Why?