Active reading is the first step of writing about a text. Active reading includes highlights, making notes, underlining main points and maybe circling ideas that spark your interest. Reading the text several times will give you more perspective and ideas of what the author is trying to relay.
The next helpful step in producing a brief outline to help yourself understand the author's thesis and main points. This puts the main ideas down in your own words and starts to help yourself start thinking about how to interpret what the author is trying to convey. Next, write a summary of the text referring back to your outline. This will require choosing the ideas that you think are most important since the summary is a short writing of the whole article. Then you must select a few points to analyze and make an argument either for or against the authors views. This will require evidence to support your arguments.
Active reading is definitely in my plans because it allow you to put your own thoughts and ideas down about what the author is saying on paper and it provides a great start to producing an outline. I would like to attempt to use an outline, which seems like a bit of work to me, but it seems like it could be very useful in formulating my ideas. My challenge will be creating arguments. As a reader, I am passive and am not usually judgemental. Hopefully this chapter will help in my writing about texts.
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