Dan Kurland's www.criticalreading.com -- Strategies for Critical Reading and Writing

Dan Kurland's www.criticalreading.com
Reading and Writing Ideas As Well As Words

How the Language Really Works:
The Fundamentals of Critical Reading and Effective Writing

Reading / Writing	Critical Reading	Inference	Choices	Ways to Read	Grammar
Learning to Read and Write	Critical Reading and Critical Thinking	Reading Ideas as Well as Words	The Ingredients of Texts	What a Text Says, Does, and Means	A Grammar for Reading and Writing

"Never accept things as they're portrayed." Anthony Shadid, journalist, 1968-2012

To non-critical readers, many texts offer the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts, one individual's "take" on the subject.

Non-critical (or pre-critical) reading is concerned with recognizing what a text says about the topic. The goal is to make sense of the presentation as a sequence of thoughts, to understand the information, ideas, and opinions stated within the text from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. This is a linear activity.

Critical reading is an analytic activity. The reader rereads a text to identify patterns of elements -- information, values, assumptions, and language usage-- throughout the discussion. These elements are tied together in an interpretation, an assertion of an underlying meaning of the text as a whole.

Critical thinking involves bringing outside knowledge and values to bear to evaluate the presentation and decide what to ultimately accept as true.

criticalreading.com shows you how to recognize what a text says, what a text does, and what a text means
by analyzing choices of content, language, and structure. It shows you what to look for, and how to think about what you find.

Alternative Indexes to the Site

Critical Reading: The Steps Principles of Critical Reading Example: Portraying Charles Drew

Fiction Writing - with Links to Discussion of Reading The Origins of this Approach

Published Text:
I Know What It Says...What Does It Mean?

About the Author

Everyone complains that students cannot read well…
and yet most high schools and colleges offer no course in critical reading.
This is the website for just such a course.

Dan Kurland's www.criticalreading.com

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