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Critical reading: what is critical reading, and why do i need to do it.

Critical reading means that a reader applies certain processes, models, questions, and theories that result in enhanced clarity and comprehension. There is more involved, both in effort and understanding, in a critical reading than in a mere "skimming" of the text. What is the difference? If a reader "skims" the text, superficial characteristics and information are as far as the reader goes. A critical reading gets at "deep structure" (if there is such a thing apart from the superficial text!), that is, logical consistency, tone, organization, and a number of other very important sounding terms.

What does it take to be a critical reader? There are a variety of answers available to this question; here are some suggested steps:

1. Prepare to become part of the writer's audience.

After all, authors design texts for specific audiences, and becoming a member of the target audience makes it easier to get at the author's purpose. Learn about the author, the history of the author and the text, the author's anticipated audience; read introductions and notes.

2. Prepare to read with an open mind.

Critical readers seek knowledge; they do not "rewrite" a work to suit their own personalities. Your task as an enlightened critical reader is to read what is on the page, giving the writer a fair chance to develop ideas and allowing yourself to reflect thoughtfully, objectively, on the text.

3. Consider the title.

This may seem obvious, but the title may provide clues to the writer's attitude, goals, personal viewpoint, or approach.

4. Read slowly.

Again, this appears obvious, but it is a factor in a "close reading." By slowing down, you will make more connections within the text.

5. Use the dictionary and other appropriate reference works.

If there is a word in the text that is not clear or difficult to define in context: look it up. Every word is important, and if part of the text is thick with technical terms, it is doubly important to know how the author is using them.

6. Make notes.

Jot down marginal notes, underline and highlight, write down ideas in a notebook, do whatever works for your own personal taste. Note for yourself the main ideas, the thesis, the author's main points to support the theory. Writing while reading aids your memory in many ways, especially by making a link that is unclear in the text concrete in your own writing.

7. Keep a reading journal

In addition to note-taking, it is often helpful to regularly record your responses and thoughts in a more permanent place that is yours to consult. By developing a habit of reading and writing in conjunction, both skills will improve.

Critical reading involves using logical and rhetorical skills. Identifying the author's thesis is a good place to start, but to grasp how the author intends to support it is a difficult task. More often than not an author will make a claim (most commonly in the form of the thesis) and support it in the body of the text. The support for the author's claim is in the evidence provided to suggest that the author's intended argument is sound, or reasonably acceptable. What ties these two together is a series of logical links that convinces the reader of the coherence of the author's argument: this is the warrant. If the author's premise is not supportable, a critical reading will uncover the lapses in the text that show it to be unsound.

Questions, comments, and other sundry things may be sent to [email protected]

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  • Subject Guides

Let's get critical: a practical guide

Critical reading.

  • Let's get critical
  • Critical thinking
  • Evaluating information
  • Reading academic articles
  • Critical writing

The purposes and practices of reading

The way we read depends on what we’re reading and why we’re reading it. The way we read a novel is different to the way we read a menu . Perhaps we are reading to understand a subject, to increase our knowledge, to analyse data, to retrieve information, or maybe even to have fun! The purpose of our reading will determine the approach we take.

Reading for information

Suppose we were trying to find some directions or opening hours... We would need to scan the text for key words or phrases that answer our question, and then we would move on.

It's a bit like doing a Google search and then just reading the results page rather than accessing the website.

Reading for understanding

When we're reading for pleasure or doing background reading on a topic, we'll generally read the text once, from start to finish . We might apply skimming techniques to look through the text quickly and get the general gist. Our engagement with the text might therefore be quite passive: we're looking for a general understanding of what's being written, perhaps only taking in the bits that seem important.

Reading for analysis

When we're doing reading for an essay, dissertation, or thesis, we're going to need to actively read the text multiple times . All the while we'll engage our prior knowledge and actively apply it to our reading, asking questions of what's been written.

This is critical reading !

Reading strategies

When you’re reading you don’t have to read everything with the same amount of care and attention. Sometimes you need to be able to read a text very quickly.

There are three different techniques for reading:

  • Scanning — looking over material quite quickly in order to pick out specific information;
  • Skimming — reading something fairly quickly to get the general idea;
  • Close reading — reading something in detail.

You'll need to use a combination of these methods when you are reading an academic text: generally, you would scan to determine the scope and relevance of the piece, skim to pick out the key facts and the parts to explore further, then read more closely to understand in more detail and think critically about what is being written.

These strategies are part of your filtering strategy before deciding what to read in more depth. They will save you time in the long run as they will help you focus your time on the most relevant texts!

You might scan when you are...

  • ...browsing a database for texts on a specific topic;
  • ...looking for a specific word or phrase in a text;
  • ...determining the relevance of an article;
  • ...looking back over material to check something;
  • ...first looking at an article to get an idea of its shape.

Scan-reading essentially means that you know what you are looking for. You identify the chapters or sections most relevant to you and ignore the rest. You're scanning for pieces of information that will give you a general impression of it rather than trying to understand its detailed arguments.

You're mostly on the look-out for any relevant words or phrases that will help you answer whatever task you're working on. For instance, can you spot the word "orange" in the following paragraph?

Being able to spot a word by sight is a useful skill, but it's not always straightforward. Fortunately there are things to help you. A book might have an index, which might at least get you to the right page. An electronic text will let you search for a specific word or phrase. But context will also help. It might be that the word you're looking for is surrounded by similar words, or a range of words associated with that one. I might be looking for something about colour, and see reference to pigment, light, or spectra, or specific colours being called out, like red or green. I might be looking for something about fruit and come across a sentence talking about apples, grapes and plums. Try to keep this broader context in mind as you scan the page. That way, you're never really just going to be looking for a single word or orange on its own. There will normally be other clues to follow to help guide your eye.

Approaches to scanning articles:

  • Make a note of any questions you might want to answer – this will help you focus;
  • Pick out any relevant information from the title and abstract – Does it look like it relates to what you're wanting? If so, carry on...
  • Flick or scroll through the article to get an understanding of its structure (the headings in the article will help you with this) – Where are certain topics covered?
  • Scan the text for any facts , illustrations , figures , or discussion points that may be relevant – Which parts do you need to read more carefully? Which can be read quickly?
  • Look out for specific key words . You can search an electronic text for key words and phrases using Ctrl+F / Cmd+F. If your text is a book, there might even be an index to consult. In either case, clumps of results could indicate an area where that topic is being discussed at length.

Once you've scanned a text you might feel able to reject it as irrelevant, or you may need to skim-read it to get more information.

You might skim when you are...

  • ...jumping to specific parts such as the introduction or conclusion;
  • ...going over the whole text fairly quickly without reading every word;

Skim-reading, or speed-reading, is about reading superficially to get a gist rather than a deep understanding. You're looking to get a feel for the content and the way the topic is being discussed.

Skim-reading is easier to do if the text is in a language that's very familiar to you, because you will have more of an awareness of the conventions being employed and the parts of speech and writing that you can gloss over. Not only will there be whole sections of a text that you can pretty-much ignore, but also whole sections of paragraphs. For instance, the important sentence in this paragraph is the one right here where I announce that the important part of the paragraph might just be one sentence somewhere in the middle. The rest of the paragraph could just be a framework to hang around this point in order to stop the article from just being a list.

However, it may more often be that the important point for your purposes comes at the start of the paragraph. Very often a paragraph will declare what it's going to be about early on, and will then start to go into more detail. Maybe you'll want to do some closer reading of that detail, or maybe you won't. If the first paragraph makes it clear that this paragraph isn't going to be of much use to you, then you can probably just stop reading it. Or maybe the paragraph meanders and heads down a different route at some point in the middle. But if that's the case then it will probably end up summarising that second point towards the end of the paragraph. You might therefore want to skim-read the last sentence of a paragraph too, just in case it offers up any pithy conclusions, or indicates anything else that might've been covered in the paragraph!

For example, this paragraph is just about the 1980s TV gameshow "Treasure Hunt", which is something completely irrelevant to the topic of how to read an article. "Treasure Hunt" saw two members of the public (aided by TV newsreader Kenneth Kendall) using a library of books and tourist brochures to solve a series of five clues (provided, for the most part, by TV weather presenter Wincey Willis). These clues would generally be hidden at various tourist attractions within a specific county of the British Isles. The contestants would be in radio contact with a 'skyrunner' (Anneka Rice) who had a map and the use of a helicopter (piloted by Keith Thompson). Solving a clue would give the contestants the information they needed to direct the skyrunner (and her crew of camera operator Graham Berry and video engineer Frank Meyburgh) to the location of the next clue, and, ultimately, to the 'treasure' (a token object such as a little silver brooch). All of this was done against the clock, the contestants having only 45' to solve the clues and find the treasure. This, necessarily, required the contestants to be able to find relevant information quickly: they would have to select the right book from the shelves, and then navigate that text to find the information they needed. This, inevitably, involved a considerable amount of skim-reading. So maybe this paragraph was slightly relevant after all? No, probably not...

Skim-reading, then, is all about picking out the bits of a text that look like they need to be read, and ignoring other bits. It's about understanding the structure of a sentence or paragraph, and knowing where the important words like the verbs and nouns might be. You'll need to take in and consider the meaning of the text without reading every single word...

Approaches to skim-reading articles:

  • Pick out the most relevant information from the title and abstract – What type of article is it? What are the concepts? What are the findings?;
  • Scan through the article and note the headings to get an understanding of structure;
  • Look more closely at the illustrations or figures ;
  • Read the conclusion ;
  • Read the first and last sentences in a paragraph to see whether the rest is worth reading.

After skimming, you may still decide to reject the text, or you may identify sections to read in more detail.

Close reading

You might read closely when you are...

  • ...doing background reading;
  • ...trying to get into a new or difficult topic;
  • ...examining the discussions or data presented;
  • ...following the details or the argument.

Again, close reading isn't necessarily about reading every single word of the text, but it is about reading deeply within specific sections of it to find the meaning of what the author is trying to convey. There will be parts that you will need to read more than once, as you'll need to consider the text in great detail in order to properly take in and assess what has been written.

Approaches to the close reading of articles:

  • Focus on particular passages or a section of the text as a whole and read all of its content – your aim is to identify all the features of the text;
  • Make notes and annotate the text as you read – note significant information and questions raised by the text;
  • Re-read sections to improve understanding;
  • Look up any concepts or terms that you don’t understand.

Google Doc

Questioning

Questioning goes hand-in-hand with reading for analysis. Before you begin to read, you should have a question or set of questions that will guide you. This will give purpose to your reading, and focus you; it will change your reading from a passive pursuit to an active one, and make it easier for you to retain the information you find. Think about what you want to achieve and keep the purpose in mind as you're reading.

Ask yourself...

  • Why am I reading this? — What is my task or assignment question, and how is this source helping to answer it?
  • What do I already know about the subject? — How can I relate what I'm reading to my own experiences?

You'll need to ask questions of the text too:

  • Examine the evidence or arguments presented;
  • Check out any influences on the evidence or arguments;
  • Check the limitations of study design or focus;
  • Examine the interpretations made.

Are you prepared to accept the authors’ arguments, opinions, or conclusions?

Critical reading: why, what, and how

Blocks to critical reading.

Certain habits or approaches we have to life can hold us back from really thinking objectively about issues. We may not realise it, but often we're our own worst enemies when it comes to being critical...

Select a student to reveal the statement they've made.

Student 1

I have been asked to work on an area that is completely new. Where do I start in terms of finding relevant texts?

Ask for guidance:

ask your tutor or module leader

use your module reading lists

make use of the Skills Guides (oh... you are! Excellent!)

ask your Faculty Librarians

Take a look at our contextagon and begin to consider sources of information .

Student 2

I don’t understand what I'm reading – It's too difficult!

If the text is difficult, don’t panic!

If it is a journal article, scan the text first – look at the contents, abstract, introduction, conclusion and subheadings to try to make sense of the argument.

Then read through the whole text to try to understand the key messages, rather than every single word or section. On a second reading, you will find it easier to understand more.

If you are struggling to get to grips with theories or concepts, you might find it useful to look at a summary as a way in -- for example, in an online subject encyclopaedia .

If you are struggling with difficult vocabulary, it may be useful to keep a glossary of key vocabulary, particularly if it is specialist or technical.

Remember, the more you read, the more you will understand it and be able to use it yourself.

Take a look at our Academic sources Skills Guide .

Student 3

Help! There is too much to read and too little time!

University study involves a large amount of reading. However, some texts on your reading lists are core texts and some are more optional.

You will generally need to read the core text, but on the optional list there may be a range of texts which deal with the same topic from different perspectives. You will need to decide which are the most relevant to your interests and assignments.

Keep in mind the questions you want the text to answer and look for what is relevant to those questions. Prioritise and read only as much as you need to get the information you need (if it's a book, use the index; if it's an article, concentrate on the relevant parts).

Improve your note-taking skills by keeping them brief and selective.

If in doubt, ask your tutor or Faculty Librarians for guidance.

Take a look at the Organise and Analyse section of the Skills Guides.

Student 4

I am struggling to remember what I have read.

To remember what you have read, you need to interact with the material. If you have questioned and evaluated the material you are reading, you will find it easier to remember.

Improve your active note-taking skills using a method like Cornell or Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review (SQR3).

Annotate your pdfs and use a note-taking app .

Make time to consolidate your reading periodically. You could do this by summarising key points from memory or connecting ideas using mindmapping.

Consider using a reference management program to keep on top of reading, and mind-mapping software like Mindgenius to connect ideas.

Student 5

Where did I read that thing?

Make sure you have a good system for taking notes and try to keep your notes organised/in one place, whether that is using an app or taking notes by hand. There is no right way to do this - find a system that works for you.

Logically label and file your notes, linking new information with what you already know and cross-reference with any handouts.

Make sure you make a note of information for referencing sources.

Where possible, save resources you have used to Google Drive or your University filestore , and organise these (e.g. by module, assessment, topic etc.).

Many of the above tips can be achieved with reference management software .

Student 6

I have strong opinions about the argument being presented in the reading – why can’t I just put this side forward?

Truth is a complicated business. Core texts or texts by highly respected authors are an author’s interpretation, and that interpretation is not above question. Any single text only provides a perspective. Even a scientific observation may be modified by further evidence. Critical writing means making sure your argument is balanced, considering and critiquing a range of perspectives.

Read texts objectively and assess their value in terms of what they can bring to your work, rather than whether you agree with them or not.

If you agree or disagree strongly with an author, you still need to analyse their argument and justify why it is sound or unsound, reliable or unreliable, and valid or lacking validity.

Ignoring opposing views can be a mistake. Your reader may think you are unaware of the different views or are not willing to think the ideas through and challenge them.

Be careful not to be blinded by your own views about a topic or an author. Engaging actively with a text which you initially don’t agree with can mean you have to rethink or adjust your own position, making your final argument stronger.

Take a look at the other parts of the Being critical Skills Guides .

That's not right. Try again.

Being actively critical

Active reading is about making a conscious effort to understand and evaluate a text for its relevance to your studies. You would actively try to think about what the text is trying to say, for example by making notes or summaries.

Critical reading is about engaging with the text by asking questions rather than passively accepting what it says. Is the methodology sound? What was the purpose? Do ideas flow logically? Are arguments properly formulated? Is the evidence there to support what is being claimed?

When you're reading critically, you're looking to...

  • ...link evidence to your own research;
  • ...compare and contrast different sources effectively;
  • ...focus research and sources;
  • ...synthesise the information you've found;
  • ...justify your own arguments with reference to other sources.

You're going beyond just an understanding of a text. You're asking questions of it; making judgements about it... What you're reading is no longer undisputed 'fact': it's an argument put forward by an author. And you need to determine whether that argument is a valid one.

"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting"

– Edmund Burke

"Feel free to reflect on the merits (or not) of that quote..."

– anon.

Critical reading involves understanding the content of the text as well as how the subject matter is developed...

  • How true is what's being written?
  • How significant are the statements that are being made?

Regardless of how objective, technical, or scientific the text may be, the authors will have made certain decisions during the writing process, and it is these decisions that we will need to examine.

Two models of critical reading

There are several approaches to critical reading. Here's a couple of models you might want to try:

Choose a chapter or article relevant to your assessment (or pick something from your reading list).

Then do the following:

Determine broadly what the text is about.

Look at the front and back covers

Scan the table of contents

Look at the title, headings, and subheadings

Read the abstract, introduction and conclusion

Are there any images, charts, data or graphs?

What are the questions the text will answer? Write some down.

Use the title, headings and subheadings to write questions

What questions do the abstract, introduction and conclusion prompt?

What do you already know about the topic? What do you need to know?

Do a first reading. Read selectively.

Read a section at a time

Answer your questions

Summarise or make brief notes

Underline or highlight any key points

Recite (in your own words)

Recall the key points.

Summarise key points from memory

Try to answer the questions you asked orally, without looking at the text or your notes

Use diagrams or mindmaps to recall the information

After you have completed the reading…

Go back over your notes and check they are clear

Check that you have answered all your questions

At a later date, review your notes to check that they make sense

At a later date, review the questions and see how much you can recall from memory

Choose a relevant article from your reading list and make brief notes on it using the prompts below.

Choose an article you have read earlier in your course and re-read it, applying the prompts below.

Compare your comments and the notes you have made. What are the differences?

Who is the text by? Who is the text aimed at? Who is described in the text?

What is the text about? What is the main point, problem or topic? What is the text's purpose?

Where is the problem/topic/issue situated?, and in what context?

When does the problem/topic/issue occur, and what is its context? When was the text written?

How did the topic/problem/issue occur? How does something work? How does one factor affect another? How does this fit into the bigger picture?

Why did the topic/problem/issue occur? Why was this argument/theory/solution used? Why not something else?

What if this or that factor were added/removed/altered? What if there are alternatives?

So what makes it significant? So what are the implications? So what makes it successful?

What next in terms of how and where else it's applied? What next in terms of what can be learnt? What next in terms of what needs doing now?

Here's a template for use with the model.

Go to File > Make a copy... to create your own version of the template that you can edit.

CC BY-NC-SA Learnhigher

Arguments & evidence

Academic reading can be a trial. In more ways than one...

It might help to think of every text you read as a witness in a court case. And you're the judge ! You're going to need to examine the testimony...

  • What’s being claimed ?
  • What are the reasons for making that claim?
  • Are there gaps in the evidence?
  • Do other witnesses support and corroborate their testimony?
  • Does the testimony support the overall case ?
  • How does the testimony relate to the other witnesses?

You're going to need to consider all sides of the case...

Considering the argument

An argument explains a position on something. A lot of academic writing is about gathering those claims and explaining your own position through their explanations.

You'll need to question...

  • ...the author's claims ;
  • ...the arguments they use — are their claims well documented ?;
  • ...the counter-arguments presented;
  • ...any bias in the source;
  • ...the research method being used;
  • ...how the author qualifies their arguments.

You'll also need to develop your own reasoned arguments, based on a logical interpretation of reliable sources of information.

What's the evidence?

Evidence isn't just the results of research or a reference to an academic study. You might use other authors' opinions to back up your argument. Keep in mind that some evidence is stronger than others:

You can get an idea of an author's certainty through the language they use, too:

Linking evidence to argument

  • Why did the author select the evidence they did? — Why did they decide to use a particular methodology, choose a specific method, or conduct the work in the way they did?
  • How does the author interpret the evidence?
  • How does the evidence prove or help the argument?

Even in the most technical and scientific disciplines, the presentation of argument will always involve elements that can be examined and questioned. For example, you could ask:

  • Why did the author select that particular topic of enquiry in the first place?
  • Why did the author select that particular process of analysis?

Synthesis :

"the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole."

You'll need to make logical connections between the different sources you encounter, pulling together their findings. Are there any patterns that emerge?

Analyse the texts you've found, and how meaningful they are in context of your studies...

  • How do they compare to each other and to any other knowledge you are gathering about the subject? Do some ideas complement or conflict with each other?
  • How will you synthesise the different sources to serve an idea you are constructing? Are there any inferences you can draw from the material?

Embracing other perspectives

Good critical research seeks to be impartial, and will embrace (or, at the very least, address) conflicting opinions. Try to bring these into your research to show comprehensive searching and knowledge of the subject.

You can strengthen your argument by explaining, critically, why one source is more persuasive than another.

Recall & review

Synthesising research is much easier if you take notes. When you know an article is relevant to your area of research, read it and make notes which are relevant to you. Consider keeping a spreadsheet or something similar , to make a note of what you have read and how it relates to the task.

You don't need elaborate notes; just a summary of the relevant details. But you can use your notes to help with the process of analysing and synthesising the texts. One method you could try is the recall & review approach:

Try to summarise key words and elements of the text:

  • Sketch a rough diagram of the text from memory — test what you can recall from your reading of the text;
  • Make headings of the main ideas and note the supporting evidence;
  • Include your evaluation — what were the strengths and weaknesses?
  • Identify any gaps in your memory.

Go over your notes, focusing on the parts you found difficult. Organise your notes, re-read parts, and start to bring everything together...

  • Summarise the text in preparation for writing;
  • Be creative: use colour and arrows; make it easy to visualise;
  • Highlight the ideas you may want to make use of;
  • Identify areas for further research.

Critical analysis vs criticism

The aim of critical reading and critical writing is not to find fault; it's not about focusing on the negative or being derogatory. Rather it's about assessing the strength of the evidence and the argument. It's just as useful to conclude that a study or an article presents very strong evidence and a well-reasoned argument as it is to identify weak evidence and poorly formed arguments.

Criticising

The author's argument is poor because it is badly written.

Critical analysis

The author's argument is unconvincing without further supporting evidence.

Academic reading: What it is and how to do it

Struggling with academic reading? This bitesize workshop breaks it down for you! Discover how to read faster, smarter, and make those academic texts work for you:

Think critically about what you read...

  • examine the evidence or arguments presented
  • check out any influences on the evidence or arguments
  • check out the limitations of study design or focus
  • examine the interpretations made

Xerte

Active critical reading

It's important to take an analytical approach to reading the texts you encounter. In the concluding part of our " Let's get critical " theme, we look at how to evaluate sources effectively, and how to develop practical strategies for reading in an efficient and critical manner.

Video

Forthcoming training sessions

Forthcoming sessions on :

CITY College

Please ensure you sign up at least one working day before the start of the session to be sure of receiving joining instructions.

If you're based at CITY College you can book onto the following sessions by sending an email with the session details to your Academic Liaison Librarian:

[email protected]

There's more training events at:

essay critical reading

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  • Last Updated: Feb 15, 2024 4:43 PM
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Critical Reading Towards Critical Writing

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Critical writing depends on critical reading. Most of the papers you write will involve reflection on written texts – the thinking and research that has already been done on your subject. In order to write your own analysis of this subject, you will need to do careful critical reading of sources and to use them critically to make your own argument. The judgments and interpretations you make of the texts you read are the first steps towards formulating your own approach.

Critical Reading: What is It?

To read critically is to make judgements about how a text is argued. This is a highly reflective skill requiring you to “stand back” and gain some distance from the text you are reading. (You might have to read a text through once to get a basic grasp of content before you launch into an intensive critical reading.) THE KEY IS THIS:

  • don’t read looking only or primarily for information
  • do read looking for ways of thinking about the subject matter

When you are reading, highlighting, or taking notes, avoid extracting and compiling lists of evidence, lists of facts and examples. Avoid approaching a text by asking “What information can I get out of it?” Rather ask “How does this text work? How is it argued? How is the evidence (the facts, examples, etc.) used and interpreted? How does the text reach its conclusions?

How Do I Read Looking for Ways of Thinking?

  • First determine the central claims or purpose of the text (its thesis). A critical reading attempts to assess how these central claims are developed or argued.
  • Begin to make some judgements about context . What audience is the text written for? Who is it in dialogue with? (This will probably be other scholars or authors with differing viewpoints.) In what historical context is it written? All these matters of context can contribute to your assessment of what is going on in a text.
  • Distinguish the kinds of reasoning the text employs. What concepts are defined and used? Does the text appeal to a theory or theories? Is any specific methodology laid out? If there is an appeal to a particular concept, theory, or method, how is that concept, theory, or method then used to organize and interpret the data? You might also examine how the text is organized: how has the author analyzed (broken down) the material? Be aware that different disciplines (i.e. history, sociology, philosophy, biology) will have different ways of arguing.
  • Examine the evidence (the supporting facts, examples, etc) the text employs. Supporting evidence is indispensable to an argument. Having worked through Steps 1-3, you are now in a position to grasp how the evidence is used to develop the argument and its controlling claims and concepts. Steps 1-3 allow you to see evidence in its context. Consider the kinds of evidence that are used. What counts as evidence in this argument? Is the evidence statistical? literary? historical? etc. From what sources is the evidence taken? Are these sources primary or secondary?
  • Critical reading may involve evaluation . Your reading of a text is already critical if it accounts for and makes a series of judgments about how a text is argued. However, some essays may also require you to assess the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. If the argument is strong, why? Could it be better or differently supported? Are there gaps, leaps, or inconsistencies in the argument? Is the method of analysis problematic? Could the evidence be interpreted differently? Are the conclusions warranted by the evidence presented? What are the unargued assumptions? Are they problematic? What might an opposing argument be?

Some Practical Tips

  • Critical reading occurs after some preliminary processes of reading. Begin by skimming research materials, especially introductions and conclusions, in order to strategically choose where to focus your critical efforts.
  • When highlighting a text or taking notes from it, teach yourself to highlight argument: those places in a text where an author explains her analytical moves, the concepts she uses, how she uses them, how she arrives at conclusions. Don’t let yourself foreground and isolate facts and examples, no matter how interesting they may be. First, look for the large patterns that give purpose, order, and meaning to those examples. The opening sentences of paragraphs can be important to this task.
  • When you begin to think about how you might use a portion of a text in the argument you are forging in your own paper, try to remain aware of how this portion fits into the whole argument from which it is taken. Paying attention to context is a fundamental critical move.
  • When you quote directly from a source, use the quotation critically. This means that you should not substitute the quotation for your own articulation of a point. Rather, introduce the quotation by laying out the judgments you are making about it, and the reasons why you are using it. Often a quotation is followed by some further analysis.
  • Critical reading skills are also critical listening skills. In your lectures, listen not only for information but also for ways of thinking. Your instructor will often explicate and model ways of thinking appropriate to a discipline.

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Critical Reading and Reading Strategy

What is critical reading.

Reading critically does not, necessarily, mean being critical of what you read.

Both reading and thinking critically don’t mean being ‘ critical ’ about some idea, argument, or piece of writing - claiming that it is somehow faulty or flawed.

Critical reading means engaging in what you read by asking yourself questions such as, ‘ what is the author trying to say? ’ or ‘ what is the main argument being presented? ’

Critical reading involves presenting a reasoned argument that evaluates and analyses what you have read.  Being critical, therefore - in an academic sense - means advancing your understanding , not dismissing and therefore closing off learning.

See also: Listening Types to learn about the importance of critical listening skills.

To read critically is to exercise your judgement about what you are reading – that is, not taking anything you read at face value.

When reading academic material you will be faced with the author’s interpretation and opinion.  Different authors will, naturally, have different slants. You should always examine what you are reading critically and look for limitations, omissions, inconsistencies, oversights and arguments against what you are reading.

In academic circles, whilst you are a student, you will be expected to understand different viewpoints and make your own judgements based on what you have read.

Critical reading goes further than just being satisfied with what a text says, it also involves reflecting on what the text describes, and analysing what the text actually means, in the context of your studies.

As a critical reader you should reflect on:

  • What the text says:  after critically reading a piece you should be able to take notes, paraphrasing - in your own words - the key points.
  • What the text describes: you should be confident that you have understood the text sufficiently to be able to use your own examples and compare and contrast with other writing on the subject in hand.
  • Interpretation of the text: this means that you should be able to fully analyse the text and state a meaning for the text as a whole.

Critical reading means being able to reflect on what a text says, what it describes and what it means by scrutinising the style and structure of the writing, the language used as well as the content.

Critical Thinking is an Extension of Critical Reading

Thinking critically, in the academic sense, involves being open-minded - using judgement and discipline to process what you are learning about without letting your personal bias or opinion detract from the arguments.

Critical thinking involves being rational and aware of your own feelings on the subject – being able to reorganise your thoughts, prior knowledge and understanding to accommodate new ideas or viewpoints.

Critical reading and critical thinking are therefore the very foundations of true learning and personal development.

See our page: Critical Thinking for more.

Developing a Reading Strategy

You will, in formal learning situations, be required to read and critically think about a lot of information from different sources. 

It is important therefore, that you not only learn to read critically but also efficiently.

The first step to efficient reading is to become selective.

If you cannot read all of the books on a recommended reading list, you need to find a way of selecting the best texts for you. To start with, you need to know what you are looking for.  You can then examine the contents page and/or index of a book or journal to ascertain whether a chapter or article is worth pursuing further.

Once you have selected a suitable piece the next step is to speed-read.

Speed reading is also often referred to as skim-reading or scanning.  Once you have identified a relevant piece of text, like a chapter in a book, you should scan the first few sentences of each paragraph to gain an overall impression of subject areas it covers.  Scan-reading essentially means that you know what you are looking for, you identify the chapters or sections most relevant to you and ignore the rest.

When you speed-read you are not aiming to gain a full understanding of the arguments or topics raised in the text.  It is simply a way of determining what the text is about. 

When you find a relevant or interesting section you will need to slow your reading speed dramatically, allowing you to gain a more in-depth understanding of the arguments raised.  Even when you slow your reading down it may well be necessary to read passages several times to gain a full understanding.

See also: Speed-Reading for Professionals .

Following SQ3R

SQ3R is a well-known strategy for reading. SQ3R can be applied to a whole range of reading purposes as it is flexible and takes into account the need to change reading speeds.

SQ3R is an acronym and stands for:

This relates to speed-reading, scanning and skimming the text.  At this initial stage you will be attempting to gain the general gist of the material in question.

It is important that, before you begin to read, you have a question or set of questions that will guide you - why am I reading this?  When you have a purpose to your reading you want to learn and retain certain information.  Having questions changes reading from a passive to an active pursuit.  Examples of possible questions include:

  • What do I already know about this subject?
  • How does this chapter relate to the assignment question?
  • How can I relate what I read to my own experiences?

Now you will be ready for the main activity of reading.  This involves careful consideration of the meaning of what the author is trying to convey and involves being critical as well as active.

Regardless of how interesting an article or chapter is, unless you make a concerted effort to recall what you have just read, you will forget a lot of the important points.  Recalling from time to time allows you to focus upon the main points – which in turn aids concentration. Recalling gives you the chance to think about and assimilate what you have just read, keeping you active.  A significant element in being active is to write down, in your own words, the key points. 

The final step is to review the material that you have recalled in your notes.  Did you understand the main principles of the argument?  Did you identify all the main points?  Are there any gaps?   Do not take for granted that you have recalled everything you need correctly – review the text again to make sure and clarify.

Continue to: Effective Reading Critical Thinking

See also: Critical Analysis Writing a Dissertation Critical Thinking and Fake News

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2a. Critical Reading

An introduction to reading in college.

While the best way to develop your skills as a writer is to actually practice by writing, practicing critical reading skills is crucial to becoming a better college writer. Careful and skilled readers develop a stronger understanding of topics, learn to better anticipate the needs of the audience, and pick up sophisticated writing “maneuvers” and strategies from professional writing. A good reading practice requires reading text and context, which you’ll learn more about in the next section. Writing a successful academic essay also begins with critical reading as you explore ideas and consider how to make use of sources to provide support for your writing.

Questions to ask as you read

If you consider yourself a particularly strong reader or want to improve your reading comprehension skills, writing out notes about a text—even if it’s in shorthand—helps you to commit the answers to memory more easily. Even if you don’t write out all these notes, answering these basic questions about any text or reading you encounter in college will help you get the most out of the time you put into your reading. It will also give you more confidence to understand and question the text while you read.

  • Is there  context  provided about the author and/or essay? If so, what stands out as important?

Context in this instance means things like dates of publication, where the piece was originally published, and any biographical information about the author. All of that information will be important for developing a critical reading of the piece, so track what’s available as you read.

  • If you had to guess, who is the author’s intended  audience ? Describe them in as much detail as possible.

Sometimes the author will state who the audience is, but sometimes you have to figure it out by context clues, such as those you tracked above. For instance, the audience for a writer on  Buzzfeed  is very different from the audience for a writer for the  Wall Street Journal —and both writers know that, which means they’re more effective at reaching their readers. Learning how to identify your audience is a crucial writing skill for all genres of writing.

  • In your own words, what is the  question  the author is trying to answer in this piece? What seems to have caused them to write in the first place?

In nonfiction writing of the kind we read in Writing 121, writers set out to answer a question. Their thesis/main argument is usually the answer to the question, so sometimes you can “reverse engineer” the question from that. Often, the question is asked in the title of the piece.

  • In your own words, what’s the author’s  main   idea or argument ? If you had to distill it down to one or two sentences, what does the author want you, the reader, to agree with?

If you’ve ever had to write a paper for a class, you’re probably familiar with a thesis or main argument. Published writers also have a thesis (or else they don’t get published!), but sometimes it can be tricky to find in a more sophisticated piece of writing. Trying to put the main argument into your own words can help.

  • How many  examples  and types of  evidence  did the author provide to support the main argument? Which examples/evidence stood out to you as persuasive?

It’s never enough to just make a claim and expect people to believe it—we have to support that claim with evidence. The types of evidence and examples that will be persuasive to readers depends on the audience, though, which is why it’s important to have some idea of your readers and their expectations.

  • Did the author raise any  points of skepticism  (also known as counterarguments)? Can you identify exactly what page or paragraph where the author does this?

As we’ll see later when the writing process, respectfully engaging with points of skepticism and counterarguments builds trust with the reader because it shows that the writer has thought about the issue from multiple perspectives before arriving at the main argument. Raising a counterargument is not enough, though. Pay careful attention to how the writer responds to that counterargument—is it an effective and persuasive response?  If not, perhaps the counterargument has more merit for you than the author’s main argument.

  • In your own words, how does the essay  conclude ? What does the author “want” from us, the readers?

A conclusion usually offers a brief summary of the main argument and some kind of “what’s next?” appeal from the writer to the audience. The “what’s next?” appeal can take many forms, but it’s usually a question for readers to ponder, actions the author thinks people should take, or areas related to the main topic that need more investigation or research. When you read the conclusion, ask yourself, “What does the author want from me now that I’ve read their essay?”

Reading Like Writers: Critical Reading

Reading as a creative act.

“The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

  • Consider the  discourse community  when you read and write in your college classes
  • Analyze any reading for  text and context
  • Read like a writer so you can write for your readers

illustration of a worm and an apple on top of a stack of two books.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to apply the concept of  discourse community  to honing your college-level critical reading skills.

Good writers are good readers, so let’s start there. When you can confidently identify the  audience, context, and purpose of a text —position it within its discourse community—you’ll be a stronger, savvier reader.

Strong, savvy readers are more effective writers because they consider their own audience, context, and purpose when they write and communicate, which makes their writing clearer and to the point.

So the goal of this lesson is to help you read like a writer!

The Savvy Reader

Good writers are good readers! And good readers. . .

man reading a book

  • get to know the author
  • get to know the author’s community + audience
  • accurately summarize the author’s argument
  • look up terms you don’t know
  • “listen” respectfully to the author’s point of view
  • have a sense of the larger conversation
  • think about other issues related to the conversation
  • put it in current context
  • analyze and assess the author’s reasoning, evidence, and assumptions

Why read critically?  While the best way to develop your skills as a writer is to actually practice by writing, practicing critical reading skills is crucial to becoming a better writer. Careful and skilled readers develop a stronger understanding of topics, learn to better anticipate the needs of the audience, and pick up writing “maneuvers” and strategies from professional writing.

Reading Like Writers

How do you read like a writer?  When you read like a writer, you are practicing deeper reading comprehension. In order to understand a text, you are reading not just what’s  in  it but what’s  around  it, too: text and context.

Practice: Reading Like Writers

In-class discussion : Advertisements are helpful for practicing reading like writers because advertisers make deliberate choices with text and images based on audience (target consumer), context (where they are reaching them), and purpose (buy this product).

  • But I’m not trying to sell a product! How can I use my newfound understanding of audience, context, and purpose to improve my writing?

It’s true! You aren’t selling a product. You aren’t (I hope) trying to manipulate your audience. You aren’t relying on discriminatory assumptions or stereotypes to appeal to your audience. But when you write, let’s say, an essay, you are asking readers to “buy into” your point of view. The goal doesn’t have to be for them to agree with you; it can be for your readers to respectfully consider, understand, or sympathize with your point of view or analysis of an issue.  The point is you’re thinking of your reader when you write, and that will make your writing process smoother and your writing clearer.

Writing for Your Readers

When you write for your readers, you. . .

  • Learn from your reading and communication experience:  What makes texts work? How are ideas conveyed clearly?
  • Analyze the writing situation:  What are the goals and purpose for a writing project? Who is your audience?
  • Explore and play as you draft:  What are different ways to respond? Can you use a better word or phrase?
  • Consider your audience:  What might a reader expect to see? What does your reader need to understand your point of view? What questions might a reader have?

poster on a wall that reads "ask more questions"

Writing as a process of inquiry

Just as you want your readers to take you seriously, you want to approach texts with an open and curious mind. Whatever the topic, it was important enough for this person to want to write on it. While we don’t have to agree with the point someone is making, we can respect their opinion and appreciate reading a different perspective.

Approach reading and writing in college in a learning zone.  Be open, be curious, ask questions, seek answers. Share, stretch, experiment.

Guides and Worksheets

  • Use this guide for any of your college reading!
  • Learn a basic study skill–annotating or taking notes on your readings

Critical Reading Guide: Text + Context

Title of the text:                                                                                  Author:

Reading the text: Comprehension

Main idea . In one sentence, summarize the main point or argument of the text.

Claim . Identify one claim in the text.

Key points . Paraphrase a key point, example, or passage that interested you.

Evidence . In your own words, describe 1-2 compelling examples or pieces of evidence that support the point/argument of the text.

Conclusion . What is the ultimate takeaway the text gives us on the topic/issue?

Personal experience . What is your experience of the topic? Have you had problems related to it?

Vocabulary . What is a word or phrase in the text you didn’t know? Look it up. What does it mean?

Inquiry . What is one thing you need more information about? Or, what is one question you have about the content of the text?

Reading for context: Rhetorical analysis

The author . Do an internet search on the author. What did you find out?

Ethos . Do you trust the author on the topic/issue? Why or why not?

Container . When and where was the text first published? Who will read/see it?

Audience . How does the author address or appeal to their readers? What tone does the author use in the text?

Bias . What knowledge, values, or beliefs does the author assume the reader shares?

Types of evidence . What types of evidence does the author use? Types of evidence include facts, examples, statistics, statements by authorities (references to or quotes from other sources), interviews, observations, logical reasoning, and personal experience

Structure . How does the author organize the text?

Purpose . What question does the author seek to answer in the text? In other words, why do you think they wrote this piece?

Mark-up Assignment: The Savvy Reader Practice

The object is to fill the empty space of the margins with your thoughts and questions to the text. By reading sympathetically (reading to understand what the writer is saying) and critically (reading to analyze and critique what the writer is saying), you are reading mindfully and creatively. You are finding those passages that you are drawn to, asking questions that you have, and beginning to develop your reaction, response, and ideas about a topic or issue. It’s a useful tool in the “getting started” phase of the writing process. Learning how to read effectively will be an invaluable skill in your college career and beyond because it means engaging in a task actively rather than passively.

Choose 1-2 paragraphs from READING X to fully annotate. This passage should be one that interests you, i.e. seems important, confusing, and/or prompted agreement, disagreement, or questions for you.

  • Circle any word you think is crucial for the passage, including ones you cannot easily define.
  • Underline phrases or images you think crucial for the meaning of the passage/essay.
  • Put a bracket around ideas or assertions you find puzzling or questionable.
  • Then write notes around the margins of the passage defining these terms, identifying the important ideas, or raising questions with the bracketed phrases. For each item you have circled, underlined, or bracketed, there should be a margin note. For this assignment, your margin notes should be substantive: they should meaty statements and full questions.

Photocopy or clear, legible photograph of paragraphs with your annotations or type up the paragraphs and annotate.

Writing as Inquiry Copyright © 2021 by Kara Clevinger and Stephen Rust is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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essay critical reading

Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research

In Between the Lines: A Guide to Reading Critically

I often find that Princeton professors assume that we all know how to “read critically.” It’s a phrase often included in essay prompts, and a skill necessary to academic writing. Maybe we’re familiar with its definition: close examination of a text’s logic, arguments, style, and other content in order to better understand the author’s intent. Reading non-critically would be identifying a metaphor in a passage, whereas the critical reader would question why the author used that specific metaphor in the first place. Now that the terminology is clarified, what does critical reading look like in practice? I’ve put together a short guide on how I approach my readings to help demystify the process.

  • Put on your scholar hat. Critical reading starts before the first page. You should assume that the reading in front of you was the product of several choices made by the author, and that each of these choices is subject to analysis. This is a critical mindset, but importantly, not a negative one. Not taking a reading at face value doesn’t mean approaching the reading hoping to find everything that’s  wrong, but rather what could be improved .
  • Revisit Writing Sem : Motive and thesis are incredibly helpful guides to understanding tough academic texts. Examining why the author is writing this text (motive), provides a context for the work that follows. The thesis should be in the back of your mind at all times to understand how the evidence presented proves it, but simultaneously thinking about the motive  allows you to think about what opponents to the author might say, and then question how the evidence would stand up to these potential rebuttals.
  • Get physical . Take notes! Critical reading involves making observations and insights—track them! My process involves underlining, especially as I see recurring terms, images, or themes. As I read, I also like to turn back and forth constantly between pages to link up arguments. I was reading a longer legal text for a class and found that flipping back and forth helped me clarify the ideas presented in the beginning of the text so I could track their development in later pages.
  • Play Professor. While I’m reading, I like to imagine potential discussion or essay topics I would come up with if I were a professor. These usually involves examining the themes of the text, placing this text in comparison or contrast with another one we have read in the class, and paying close attention to how the evidence attempts to prove the thesis.
  • Form an (informed) opinion. After much work, underlining, and debating, it’s safe to make your own judgments about the author’s work. In forming this opinion, I like to mentally prepare to have this opinion debated, which helps me complicate my own conclusions—a great start to a potential essay!

Critical reading is an important prerequisite for the academic writing that Princeton professors expect. The best papers don’t start with the first word you type, but rather how you approach the texts composing your essay subject. Hopefully, this guide to reading critically will help you write critically as well!

–Elise Freeman, Social Sciences Correspondent

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How to Write a Critical Essay

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  • An Introduction to Punctuation

Olivia Valdes was the Associate Editorial Director for ThoughtCo. She worked with Dotdash Meredith from 2017 to 2021.

essay critical reading

  • B.A., American Studies, Yale University

A critical essay is a form of academic writing that analyzes, interprets, and/or evaluates a text. In a critical essay, an author makes a claim about how particular ideas or themes are conveyed in a text, then supports that claim with evidence from primary and/or secondary sources.

In casual conversation, we often associate the word "critical" with a negative perspective. However, in the context of a critical essay, the word "critical" simply means discerning and analytical. Critical essays analyze and evaluate the meaning and significance of a text, rather than making a judgment about its content or quality.

What Makes an Essay "Critical"? 

Imagine you've just watched the movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." If you were chatting with friends in the movie theater lobby, you might say something like, "Charlie was so lucky to find a Golden Ticket. That ticket changed his life." A friend might reply, "Yeah, but Willy Wonka shouldn't have let those raucous kids into his chocolate factory in the first place. They caused a big mess."

These comments make for an enjoyable conversation, but they do not belong in a critical essay. Why? Because they respond to (and pass judgment on) the raw content of the movie, rather than analyzing its themes or how the director conveyed those themes.

On the other hand, a critical essay about "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" might take the following topic as its thesis: "In 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,' director Mel Stuart intertwines money and morality through his depiction of children: the angelic appearance of Charlie Bucket, a good-hearted boy of modest means, is sharply contrasted against the physically grotesque portrayal of the wealthy, and thus immoral, children."

This thesis includes a claim about the themes of the film, what the director seems to be saying about those themes, and what techniques the director employs in order to communicate his message. In addition, this thesis is both supportable  and  disputable using evidence from the film itself, which means it's a strong central argument for a critical essay .

Characteristics of a Critical Essay

Critical essays are written across many academic disciplines and can have wide-ranging textual subjects: films, novels, poetry, video games, visual art, and more. However, despite their diverse subject matter, all critical essays share the following characteristics.

  • Central claim . All critical essays contain a central claim about the text. This argument is typically expressed at the beginning of the essay in a thesis statement , then supported with evidence in each body paragraph. Some critical essays bolster their argument even further by including potential counterarguments, then using evidence to dispute them.
  • Evidence . The central claim of a critical essay must be supported by evidence. In many critical essays, most of the evidence comes in the form of textual support: particular details from the text (dialogue, descriptions, word choice, structure, imagery, et cetera) that bolster the argument. Critical essays may also include evidence from secondary sources, often scholarly works that support or strengthen the main argument.
  • Conclusion . After making a claim and supporting it with evidence, critical essays offer a succinct conclusion. The conclusion summarizes the trajectory of the essay's argument and emphasizes the essays' most important insights.

Tips for Writing a Critical Essay

Writing a critical essay requires rigorous analysis and a meticulous argument-building process. If you're struggling with a critical essay assignment, these tips will help you get started.

  • Practice active reading strategies . These strategies for staying focused and retaining information will help you identify specific details in the text that will serve as evidence for your main argument. Active reading is an essential skill, especially if you're writing a critical essay for a literature class.
  • Read example essays . If you're unfamiliar with critical essays as a form, writing one is going to be extremely challenging. Before you dive into the writing process, read a variety of published critical essays, paying careful attention to their structure and writing style. (As always, remember that paraphrasing an author's ideas without proper attribution is a form of plagiarism .)
  • Resist the urge to summarize . Critical essays should consist of your own analysis and interpretation of a text, not a summary of the text in general. If you find yourself writing lengthy plot or character descriptions, pause and consider whether these summaries are in the service of your main argument or whether they are simply taking up space.
  • An Introduction to Academic Writing
  • Definition and Examples of Analysis in Composition
  • How to Write a Good Thesis Statement
  • The Ultimate Guide to the 5-Paragraph Essay
  • How To Write an Essay
  • Tips on How to Write an Argumentative Essay
  • What an Essay Is and How to Write One
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  • How To Write a Top-Scoring ACT Essay for the Enhanced Writing Test
  • How to Structure an Essay
  • How to Write a Solid Thesis Statement
  • How to Write a Response Paper
  • Writing a History Book Review
  • How to Write a Great Book Report
  • Write an Attention-Grabbing Opening Sentence for an Essay
  • The Definition of a Review in Composition

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2 – Critical Reading

essay critical reading

“Citizens of modern societies must be good readers to be successful. Reading skills do not guarantee success for anyone, but success is much harder to come by without being a skilled reader. The advent of the computer and the Internet does nothing to change this fact about reading. If anything, electronic communication only increases the need for effective reading skills and strategies as we try to cope with the large quantities of information made available to us.”      –William Grabe

The importance of reading as a literacy skill is without a doubt. It is essential for daily life navigation and academic success. Reading for daily life navigation is relatively easier, compared to academic reading. Think about the kinds of reading you did in elementary and high school (e.g., story books, picture books, textbook chapters, literary works, online information, lecture notes, etc.).

Now think about what you were expected to do with your reading at school (e.g., memorize, summarize, discuss, pass a test, apply information, or write essays or papers).

Research shows that what you expect to do with a text affects how you read it.

–Bartholomae & Petrosky (1996)

So, reading is not always the same; you read school texts differently than the texts you choose outside of school tasks. Furthermore, there are many external and internal factors that influence how you interpret and use what you read. Much depends on your background (e.g., cultural participation in communities, identity, historical knowledge), and the context in which you are reading. Classrooms and teachers certainly have an influence. The teaching methods used by your instructor, the texts your instructor chooses, and expectations of student performance on assignments all affect how you read and what you do to accomplish an assignment.

Different levels of education also emphasize different types of reading. For example, in primary or secondary education, you learn what is known, so you focus on correctness, memorization of facts, and application of facts. In higher education, although you might still be required to understand and memorize information, you expand what is known by examining ideas and creating new knowledge. In those processes at different levels, reading has been used for different purposes.

Multilingual reading and writing expert William Grabe has identified six different purposes:

  • Reading to search for information (scanning and skimming)
  • Reading for quick understanding (skimming)
  • Reading to learn
  • Reading to integrate information
  • Reading to evaluate, critique, and use information
  • Reading for general comprehension (in many cases, reading for interest or reading to entertain)

In college, reading to evaluate, critique, and use information is the most practiced and tested skill. But what does it mean? Reading to evaluate, critique, and use information is related to critical reading.

Definition of Critical Reading

Critical reading is a more ACTIVE way of reading. It is a deeper and more complex engagement with a text. Critical reading is a process of analyzing, interpreting and, sometimes, evaluating. When we read critically, we use our critical thinking skills to QUESTION both the text and our own reading of it. Different disciplines may have distinctive modes of critical reading (scientific, philosophical, literary, etc).

[Source: Duncan , n.d., Critical Reading ]

Critical reading does not have to be all negative. The aim of critical reading is not to find fault but to assess the strength of the evidence and the argument. It is just as useful to conclude that a study, or an article, presents very strong evidence and a well-reasoned argument, as it is to identify the studies or articles that are weak.

[Source: What is critical reading? ]

There’s No Reason to Eat Animals by Lindsay Rajt

If we care about the environment and believe that kindness is a virtue-as we all say that we do–a vegan diet is the only sensible option. The question becomes: Why eat animals at all?

Animals are made of flesh, bone, and blood, just as you and I are. They form friendships, feel pain and joy, grieve for lost loved ones and are afraid to die. One cannot profess to care about animals while tearing them away from their friends and families and cutting their throats–or paying someone else to do it–simply to satisfy a fleeting taste for flesh.

[adapted from Pattison, 2015, Critical Reading: English for Academic Purposes for instructional purposes ]

What is your position on the issue?

Do you think that the language used helps the audience? How?

How does the language use affect your evaluation of the issue?

Obesity: A Public Health Failure? By Tavis Glassman PhD, MPH, MCHES, Jennifer Glassman M.A., CCC-SLP, and Aaron J. Diehr, M.A.

Obesity rates continue to increase, bringing into question the efficacy of prevention and treatment efforts. While intuitively appealing, the law on weight gain focusing on calories is too simplistic because calories represent only one factor on issues of weight management. From a historical perspective, the recommendation to eat a low fat, high carbohydrate diet may have been the wrong message to promote, thereby making the obesity situation worse. Suggestions to solve the issues of obesity include taxing, restricting advertising, and reducing the use of sugar. Communities must employ these and other strategies to decrease sugar use and reduce obesity rates.

How would you describe the authors’ educational background?

How does the authors’ background affect your evaluation of the argument?

Students Want More Mobile Devices in Classroom by Ellis Booker

Released last week, the Student Mobile Device Survey reveals that students almost unanimously believe mobile technology will change education and make learning more fun. The survey, which collected the responses of 2,350 US students, was conducted for learning company Pearson by Harris Interactive.

According to the survey, 92% of elementary, middle and high school students believe mobile devices will change the way students learn in the future and make learning more fun (90%). A majority (69%) would like to use mobile devices more in the classroom.

The survey results also contained some surprises. For example, college students in math and science are much more likely to use technology for learning, and researchers expected to see this same pattern in the lower grades.

Are you convinced by the survey results? Why?

Color Scheme Associations in Context

The colors you surround yourself with at work are also important as they make a difference in how you are perceived by members of the public. Traditional workplaces still use dark colors such as navy blue, forest green, and chocolate brown to give clients a sense of seriousness and professionalism.

Think about it: which accountant would you choose to prepare your tax return: the one whose office has navy blue drapes and lamps and a maritime scene on the wall or the one whose office is painted in hot pink with a cartoon character on the wall? An online survey of lawyers carried out by Legal Scene magazine showed that of 287 respondents, 38 percent chose a navy blue color scheme for their office; 32 percent chose brown; 19 percent chose forest green; 7 percent chose burgundy; and only 4 percent chose red, pink or orange (Perkins, 2013).

What kind of bias might be implicated in this survey?

What is your personal experience?

These practices do not ask you to memorize or summarize the information you read, but instead, they ask you to provide your opinions and judgment. To answer those questions, you need to engage in critical reading, a form of active reading.

Active reading, which predominates college-level reading, means reading with the purpose of getting a deeper understanding of the texts you are reading and being engaged in the actions of analyzing, questioning, and evaluating the texts. In other words, instead of accepting the information given to you, you challenge its value by examining the source of the information and the formation of an argument.

The difference in how you read falls into two broad categories:

(Source: Reading Critically ]

Reading critically and actively is essential for college students. But what does critical reading look like in actual practice? Here are the steps that you can follow to do the critical reading.

Step 1:  Understand the purpose of your reading and be selective

As college students, you are very busy with your daily coursework. A freshman usually takes four to five courses or even six courses per semester. This means you have tons of reading to do every week. Getting to know the purpose of the reading assignments can save you time as your reading is more targeted. Remember you do not have to read a whole chapter or book. What you can do is through scanning to determine the sections that are useful for you and then read the parts carefully.

Step 2:  Evaluate the reading text

While reading a text, you need to question/analyze/evaluate the text by considering the following:

  • Assess whether a source is reliable (Read around the text for the title, author, publisher, publication date, good/bad examples, tones, etc.)
  • Distinguish between facts and opinions (Scan for any evidence)
  • Recognize multiple opinions in a text
  • Infer meaning when it is not directly stated
  • Agree or disagree with what you read
  • Consider the relevance of the text to your task
  • Consider what is missing from a text

It may well be necessary to read passages several times to gain a full understanding of texts and be able to evaluate the source. In this process, you can underline, highlight, or circle important parts and points, take notes, or add comments in the margins.

Critical reading often involves re-reading a text multiple times, putting our focus on different aspects of the text. The first time we read a text, we may be focused on getting an overall sense of the information the author is presenting – in other words, simply understanding what they are trying to say. On subsequent readings, however, we can focus on how the author presents that information, the kinds of evidence they provide to support their arguments (and how convincing we find that evidence), the connection between their evidence and their conclusions, etc.

[Source: Lane, 2021, Critical Thinking for Critical Writing ]

Step 3:  Document your reading and form your own argument

After you finish reading a text, sort out your notes and keep track of the sources you have read on the topic you are exploring. After you read several sources, you might be able to form your own argument(s) and use the sources as evidence for your argument(s).

In college, critical reading usually leads to critical writing.

Critical writing comes from critical reading. Whenever you have to write a paper, you have to reflect on various written texts, think and interpret research that has previously been carried out on your subject. With the aim of writing your independent analysis of the subject, you have to critically read sources and use them suitably to formulate your argument. The interpretations and conclusions you derive from the literature you read are the stepping stones towards devising your own approach.

[Source: Does Critical Reading Influence Academic Writing? ]

In a word, through critical reading, you form your own argument(s), and the evidence used to support your argument(s) is usually from the texts that you read critically. The Source Essay Writing Service explains how critical reading influences academic writing.

How does critical reading influence your writing skills?

Once you start reading texts critically, you develop an understanding of how to write research papers. Here are some practical tips that will help you in academic writing:

  • Examine introductions and conclusions of the texts while critical reading so when you write an independent content, you would be able to decide how to focus your critical work.
  • When you highlight or take notes from a text, make sure you focus on the argument. The way the author explains the analytical progress, the concepts used, and arriving at conclusions will help you to write your own facts and examples in an interesting way.
  • By closely reading the texts, you will be able to look for the patterns that give meaning, purpose, and consistency to the text. The way the arguments are presented in paragraphs will aid you in structuring information in your writing.
  • When you critically read a text, you are able to learn how an argument is placed in the text. Try to understand how you can use this placement strategy in academic writing. Paying attention to the context is an important aspect that you learn from critical reading.
  • While reading a text, you will notice that the author has given the due credit to the sources used or the references that were consulted. This will help you in understanding how you can cite sources and quotes in your content.
  • Critical reading skills enhance your way of thinking and writing skills. The more you read, the better is your knowledge and vocabulary. It is important to use the precise words to express your meaning. You can learn new words and improve your writing by reading as many texts as you can.

Activity 1: Discuss the following questions with your group

  • A website from the United Nations Educational, Scientific ad Cultural Organization (UNESCO) gives some statistics about the level of education reached by young women in Indonesia. Is this a reliable source?
  • You find an interesting article about addiction to online gambling. The article has some interesting statistics, but it was published ten years ago. Is it worth using?
  • You find a book about World War II that presents a different opinion from your other sources. What would you like to know about the author before you decide whether or not to take him seriously?
  • An article tells you that research into space exploration is a waste of money. Do you think this article is presenting facts or opinions? How can you tell? What might you look for in the article?
  • You find some research that states that people who own dogs generally live longer lives than those who do not. The author has some convincing arguments, but you are not sure whether or not she has enough evidence. How mush is enough?
  • A newspaper article tells you about human rights abuses in a certain country. The writer of this article has never visited the country in question; his claims are based on interviews with other people. How would you evaluate his information?
  • You find two websites about the use of seaweed as a source of energy. One is full of long words and complicated sentences; the other uses simple, clear language. Is the first one a more reliable source?
  • You have read nine different articles that tell you that there is no connection between wealth and happiness. The tenth article gives the opposite opinion: rich people are happier than those who are poor. What questions would you ask yourself about this article before you decide whether or not to consider it?

Activity 2: Reading for analyzing styles

Please read the news and discuss the importance of the graphs in supporting the arguments of the text.

Gender Pay Gap in U.S. Held Steady in 2020

By amanda barroso and anna brown.

The gender gap in pay has remained relatively stable in the United States over the past 15 years or so. In 2020, women earned 84% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers. Based on this estimate, it would take an extra 42 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2020.

As has been the case in recent decades, the 2020 wage gap was smaller for workers ages 25 to 34 than for all workers 16 and older. Women ages 25 to 34 earned 93 cents for every dollar a man in the same age group earned on average. In 1980, women ages 25 to 34 earned 33 cents less than their male counterparts, compared with 7 cents in 2020. The estimated 16-cent gender pay gap among all workers in 2020 was down from 36 cents in 1980.

essay critical reading

The U.S. Census Bureau has also analyzed the gender pay gap, though its analysis looks only at full-time workers (as opposed to full- and part-time workers). In 2019, full-time, year-round working women earned 82% of what their male counterparts earned, according to the Census Bureau’s most recent analysis.

Why does a gender pay gap still persist?

Much of this gap has been explained by measurable factors such as educational attainment, occupational segregation and work experience. The narrowing of the gap is attributable in large part to gains women have made in each of these dimensions.

Even though women have increased their presence in higher-paying jobs traditionally dominated by men, such as professional and managerial positions, women as a whole continue to be over-represented in lower-paying occupations relative to their share of the workforce. This may contribute to gender differences in pay.

essay critical reading

Other factors that are difficult to measure, including gender discrimination, may also contribute to the ongoing wage discrepancy. In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey , about four-in-ten working women (42%) said they had experienced gender discrimination at work, compared with about two-in-ten men (22%). One of the most commonly reported forms of discrimination focused on earnings inequality. One-in-four employed women said they had earned less than a man who was doing the same job; just 5% of men said they had earned less than a woman doing the same job.

Motherhood can also lead to interruptions in women’s career paths and have an impact on long-term earnings. Our 2016 survey of workers who had taken parental, family or medical leave in the two years prior to the survey found that mothers typically take more time off than fathers after birth or adoption. The median length of leave among mothers after the birth or adoption of their child was 11 weeks, compared with one week for fathers. About half (47%) of mothers who took time off from work in the two years after birth or adoption took off 12 weeks or more.

Mothers were also nearly twice as likely as fathers to say taking time off had a negative impact on their job or career. Among those who took leave from work in the two years following the birth or adoption of their child, 25% of women said this had a negative impact at work, compared with 13% of men.

essay critical reading

[Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/25/gender-pay-gap-facts/ ]

Activity 3: Reading for arguments

What’s the main argument of the poem?

Fire and Ice

By robert frost, some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. from what i’ve tasted of desire i hold with those who favor fire. but if it had to perish twice, i think i know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice..

References:

Barroso, A., & Brown, A. (2021, May 25). Gender pay gap in U.S. held steady in 2020. Pew Research Center. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/25/gender-pay-gap-facts/

Bartholomae, D., Petrosky, T., & Waite, S. (2002). Ways of reading: An anthology for writers (p. 720). Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Duncan, J. (n.d.). The Writing Centre, University of Toronto Scarborough. Modified by Michael O’Connor. https://www.stetson.edu/other/writing-program/media/CRITICAL%20READING.pdf

Grabe, W. (2008). Reading in a second language: Moving from theory to practice. Cambridge University Press.

Lane, J. (2021, July 9). Critical thinking for critical writing. Simon Fraser University. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/slc/writing/argumentation/critical-thinking-writing

Pattison, T. (2015). Critical Reading: English for academic purposes for instructional purposes. Pearson.

Sourceessay. (n.d.). What is critical reading. https://sourceessay.com/does-critical-reading-influence-academic-writing/

University of Leicester. (n.d.). What is critical reading? Bangor University. https://www.bangor.ac.uk/studyskills/study-guides/critical-reading.php.en

Critical Reading, Writing, and Thinking Copyright © 2022 by Zhenjie Weng, Josh Burlile, Karen Macbeth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critical reading

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Critical reading is the process of reading that goes beyond just understanding a text. Critical reading involves:

  • carefully considering and evaluating the reading
  • identifying the reading's strengths and implications
  • identifying the reading's weaknesses and flaws
  • looking at the 'big picture' and deciding how the reading fits into the greater academic context (the understandings presented in other books and articles on this topic)

In brief, you are actively responding to the reading. Critical reading is useful at all stages of academic study, but is particularly important when writing an article critique or a literature review .

Critical reading often involves asking questions about the reading. In particular, you are examining the strengths and weaknesses of the reading's argument.

To do this, you need to consider

  • the reading's background
  • its purpose and overall conclusion (claim)
  • the evidence used in the reading
  • the logical connections between the claim and the evidence
  • the reading's balance
  • its limitations
  • how it relates to other sources and research
  • if the reading is based on research, how this research was conducted

Each of these affects how 'strong' the argument is, that is, how convincing it is.

Note: The questions here can also be used to improve your own writing, especially when you are required to construct an argument.

Before you consider the argument of a reading, you should build up a background picture of the reading.

While you cannot evaluate an argument based solely on the qualifications of the author, their background can give you an indication of credibility or potential bias.

  • Are they a recognised academic expert or a new researcher?
  • Do they work for a university, the government, an organisation, or a commercial interest?

As with the author, the type of reading can give you an idea of potential bias and the quality / applicability of the information. Is this an academic source ? Is it trying to convince you of something or sell something?

  • Periodical articles: Is this from a scholarly journal, a magazine, or a newspaper?
  • Books: Is this from an academic publisher or a commercial publisher?
  • Websites: Is the publishing organisation clearly identified? Check the URL: Is it governmental (URL ending in .govt.nz/.gov), academic (URL ending in .ac/.ac.nz/.edu), commercial (URL ending in .co.nz/.com) or an organisation (URL ending in .org/.org.nz)?

The reading may be organised and written differently or have different goals depending on the intended audience.

Is it aimed at:

  • academics and researchers?
  • people in the industry?
  • the general public?

Up-to-date information is more useful. Something that was believed to be true in 1982 may have been disproved or improved since then.

Getting the 'big picture' of the reading is essential so that you can see how all the pieces fit together.

The main claim (or argument) of the reading is the point that it is trying to prove. The claim of a reading is often a single statement: the thesis statement . This is often found in the abstract, the introduction, and/or the conclusion of the article.

  • Is the main conclusion clear?
  • Does the evidence lead to this conclusion?

It is useful to think about the consequences and applications of the argument, as this may uncover particular strengths or further flaws.

  • Are the applications practical or meaningful?
  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of the applications?
  • What are the costs and benefits of the applications?

The structure of the reading will give you an idea of which points are most important, and which points support the conclusion. Look at

  • subheadings
  • the introduction

It may be useful to draw a map or diagram of the reading's structure.

It is essential to consider the quality of the evidence in the reading, as this directly relates to the usefulness of the reading.

  • Objective facts are generally acceptable.
  • Information obtained through research is convincing, as long as the methodology is appropriate.
  • Opinions can easily be contradicted by an alternative opinion. They are more likely to be biased.
  • Personal experience may not apply to other cases and so is not easily generalized.
  • Does the evidence agree with other sources?
  • Does the evidence agree with your own understanding of the topic?
  • Does the evidence connect to the reading's conclusion?
  • Is it enough to support the argument?
  • Is the evidence convincing?

Many readings rely on particular theories or models to make their argument.

  • Is the theory the best fit for this topic?
  • Is the theory properly interpreted and explained in the reading?
  • Does the theory explain the entire conclusion or only part of it?
  • Are there parts of the conclusion not explained by the theory?

Methodology

If the reading is based on any kind of research (e.g. a survey, an experiment, a case study), it is important to consider how the research was conducted as this can affect the validity of the findings reported.

  • Quantitative research involves measuring (quantifying) and analysing specific numerical or statistical data. It uses mathematical models to interpret data. Studies are designed so that mathematical models can be easily applied to research contexts using experiments and surveys.
  • Qualitative research involves the examination, analysis, and interpretation of observations or accounts of events in order to identify themes, underlying meanings, and patterns. This approach does not use mathematical models, but rather interviews, case studies and analysis of written documents.

Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, but the type of research will always affect the findings. Is this type of research appropriate for this topic?

The wider the range or sample size of research, the more the findings can be generalised.

  • If the research is a survey or questionnaire, how many participants were there?
  • Did the participants come from different cultural / social backgrounds?
  • Were the participants of different ages / occupations / genders / ethnic groups / nationalities?

Could other research prove this research wrong? This is not asking whether the research is false, but whether it is possible to test its validity. If it is impossible to prove a claim wrong, it is also impossible to prove a claim right; the claim is instead a matter of faith.

If someone else conducted similar research using these methods, would they be likely to have a similar result? If it is impossible to repeat research, it is also impossible to test it.

Were there other methods that may be more effective, more scientific, more reliable, more culturally-sensitive, or more practical? Why weren't they used?

When reading critically it is important to examine the chain of reasoning used by the author, as any gaps or problems can undermine the validity of the conclusion.

Definitions are an important part of academic study; terminology often varies between topics and between authors.

  • Is each term that has been used properly defined?
  • Are there any terms that could have several different interpretations?

Does every point follow on from the last point? If there is a gap between two ideas, this could be a 'leap of faith' that undermines the overall conclusion.

Is the reasoning logically sound? Some arguments are weak because they rely on faulty logic; these are often referred to as logical fallacies .

In order to read critically you have to consider whether the argument is appropriately balanced, looking at the issue or problem from relevant perspectives.

  • What details are missing?
  • Are there any claims that seem unusual or extraordinary? You should pay attention to parts of the argument that seem controversial, as there are likely to be other explanations.

It is impossible for a reading to be completely balanced because a conclusion must ultimately be drawn, but some readings are more biased than others.

  • Is the reading trying to convince you of something? Why?
  • Did the reading push one point of view to the exclusion of others ?

Readings are often written from one perspective; what other ways can you look at this topic?

Try, for example, a PESTLE analysis, which examines the p olitical, e conomic, s ociological, t echnological, l egal, and e nvironmental perspectives and implications.

A reading that offers several perspectives is more balanced, and a strong argument must consider and argue against counter-arguments.

  • Are you aware of any counter-arguments that exist but were not discussed? This is a sign of a weaker argument.

Limitations

Some readings will identify their assumptions; this is so that if an assumption is later proven false, it is clear whether the argument is still correct or not.

  • Does the reading make assumptions that it does not identify? Hidden assumptions may weaken the argument.

Some theories or principles only apply in certain situations. If a theory is applied outside of those situations, it may weaken the argument.

Other sources

No reading exists in isolation. You must consider how the reading fits into the 'bigger picture' of the larger academic context.

If the reading disagrees with something from other readings, your textbook, or the lecturer, it may be incorrect. It may also be a controversial or debatable argument, or this reading may be discussing the argument from a different perspective.

When there is more than one way to explain evidence, you must carefully evaluate the plausibility of each explanation.

  • What may have changed since the reading was written?

References and further reading

Allen, M. (2004). Smart thinking: Skills for critical understanding and writing (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. [ Massey Library link ]

Flage, D. (2003). The art of questioning: An introduction to critical thinking . Pearson Education. [ Massey Library link ]

Groarke, L. A., & Tindale, C. W. (2004). Good reasoning matters! A constructive approach to critical thinking (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. [ Massey Library link ]

Metcalfe, M. (2006). Reading critically at university. Sage. [ Massey Library link ]

Turner, J. (2002). How to study: A short introduction . Sage. [ Massey Library link ]

Page authorised by Director - Centre for Learner Success Last updated on 26 February, 2020

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Introduction

Sarah Johnson; Beth Caruso; and Nic Learned

Welcome to College Composition: An introductory letter to students

Nobody majors in College Composition. Why is that?

The homework is one possible answer: there tends to be a lot of it, and it tends to require a different kind of engagement than the homework you might do in your other classes. For instance, when asked to simply read from a history textbook, you need only remember key information. And in disciplines like math, there’s typically a clear right or wrong answer. But with writing, there is no clear path–no prescription telling you exactly what to say or how to say it. Instead, you have to wrestle with the material, and you have to push yourself to think thoughts that nobody has ever thought before.

But the main reason that nobody majors in College Composition is likely that with the exception of torturing students teaching, there’s no career in it. Honestly, when is the last time you heard a parent or friend say to someone, “Hey, I have some College Composition work I need done. Do you know anybody who does a good job and won’t overcharge me?”

So why are you here? Why are you spending time on something that requires about as much effort as anything else you will do in college? There are two reasons:

First, nearly every other major in college will require writing. That idea is an easy sell for text-heavy disciplines like history, psychology, religion, etc.. But for those of you math types—who see numbers as truth and the words that surround them as fluffy stuff—it can be a bit tougher to see how the ability to write well is necessary for you to succeed in your courses. We must admit that at first, it might not be. But as you progress through your major, you will find that writing becomes an increasingly integral part of your work—the part where you explain to us numbers-impaired folks what all those crazy equations mean and why we should care about them. Similarly, you aspiring engineers will have to explain how your work can be lucrative to investors, just as you cyber-security folks will need to convince your clients that you know what you’re doing.

The second (and more important) reason that you are here has to do with what makes writing such an energy-consuming task in the first place: writing the way you will be expected to write in this course requires creating knowledge and perspective that is new, which means going beyond memorizing facts, repeating the perspectives of experts, or regurgitating what your teacher said the day before. It means transitioning from passively consuming information to actively constructing it—from being on the receiving end of the knowledge that others have created to being a creator of knowledge yourself. All majors in college share this central aim for you to transition from simply learning about their discipline to actually contributing to it, though it may not be apparent in your first and second-year courses. And that is why you are here: to learn to become a critical contributor to a knowledge-making community, a quality that you will need, not only to succeed in your chosen major, but also to succeed in your chosen profession, and more broadly, to contribute to society actively and constructively. In a sense, it is less accurate to say that nobody majors in College Composition and more accurate to say that everyone does.

And so, the emphasis in this course won’t be learning how to construct grammatically-correct sentences (though grammar is part of it), nor will it be learning how to write the perfect five-paragraph essay (honestly, you can forget everything you’ve learned about those); instead, the emphasis will be learning how to contribute to a knowledge-making community—communities like the ones you will encounter in your other courses, regardless of discipline, but which you will also encounter in the professional and civic contexts you hope to be a part of after you leave college. In a nutshell, you are here to learn how to use the writing process to create knowledge and perspective that is useful to you and others. 

A message from a professor

Asking Questions

What do you learn about in a course that aims to help you transition from passively receiving knowledge to playing an active role in its creation? What concepts, skills, etc. comprise the central content of such a course? And most importantly, what will you have to learn to pass it?

The shortest possible answer to those questions: critical inquiry .

What is critical inquiry? If you ask 20 different instructors of College Composition to define it, you will likely get 20 different answers (we did and we did), but that transition from passively receiving knowledge to actively creating it begins now, so at some point, you will have to work out your own understanding, and yet you might take comfort in the fact that there are many acceptable definitions.

For now, it is enough to note the word, “inquiry,” which connotes asking questions and seeking something that is not already known. And the word, “critical,” which is not really negative in this sense but instead refers to critical thinking, which itself entails reflection, evaluation, and looking at an issue from multiple perspectives. As a process, Critical Inquiry thus begins with questions, it examines, engages, and evaluates others’ responses to those questions, and it results in the writer putting forward a provisional but informed response to his/her/their original research questions. This response should be useful to the writer, personally, but should also be useful to other researchers and stakeholders addressed or affected by the research topic.

In this course, you will thus learn to form questions and to use those questions to drive your research, your writing, and ultimately, what you contribute to the conversations taking place among people currently doing research around the areas you’re interested in.

In practice, and as you apply these lessons, we’ll ask you to let go of the myth (or dream) of a perfect first draft – a final product that sounds great and that you write, sentence by painstaking sentence, the first time you sit down to work on it. In fact, most of your teachers (and most creative writers and professional writers) know that when they sit down to tackle a serious writing project, they are going to produce a bit of a mess – a collection of ideas, perhaps, some interesting paragraphs, maybe, but certainly not a completed product. Instead, experienced writers seem to recognize that when we write, we’re writing to ourselves first, we’re figuring out our ideas and only starting to properly arrange them. We know that the thesis might still be a bit unclear, we know that we’re still learning and thinking about things – this is critical inquiry in action.

A message from a professor

Knowing that the first draft will never be the final draft, well, it takes the pressure off. We can sit down, get started, trust that we’ll return later, and not worry so much about picking every “right” word or “sounding good.” Revisiting the draft, taking breaks, revising after getting feedback, these are all steps that will make the writing experience less stressful and, most likely, more successful. That’s what happens when we treat writing (and learning and critical inquiry and research in general) as a process.

In service of that process, you will learn about a few other things along the way:

  • The reading process will help you read sophisticated texts in sophisticated ways.
  • The writing process will help you produce sophisticated texts of your own through brainstorming, pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing.
  • Information literacy will help you to locate sources who have done research on the topics that matter to you, and it will help you to know which kinds to use and in what ways.
  • Rhetoric —the study of persuasive writing, speech, and/or other media—will help you better understand the audiences, purposes, and contexts of those sources, and it will help you make strategic composing decisions in light of your own audiences, purposes, and contexts.
  • Argument will help you analyze the arguments of your sources and will help you compose effective arguments of your own–arguments that will constitute your contribution to the conversations taking place among your sources.
  • Genre will help you compose with mindfulness that the texts you read and the texts you write are always read through readers’ expectations.
  • Academic writing conventions will help you write with fluency in the forms that you will use in your other courses and will give you experience contributing actively to a knowledge-making community.
  • Multimodality will help you compose traditional and non-traditional texts with awareness of the ways in which non-alphabetic factors shape readers’ understanding of texts.
  • Structure, grammar, and mechanics will help you to produce clear, cohesive, and sophisticated writing (as appropriate to your rhetorical situation).

That is an imposing and potentially intimidating list, but this text and your instructor will guide you through these skills that, we argue, are in fact quite natural to humans, who are inherently social, chatty beings, and for whom consuming and composing text is almost second-nature.

How This Course Will Benefit You

Here, at Howard Community College, we have seven learning objectives for this course.

 Learning Objectives for College Composition

  • Construct texts by working through varying stages of the writing process.
  • Demonstrate awareness of audience, purpose, and context through making informed decisions about forms of appeal, style, genre, and modality.
  • Exhibit knowledge of writing conventions related to expectations such as clarity, cohesion, organization, paragraph structure, grammar, and mechanics.
  • Maintain a controlling purpose for research and writing that emerges from a clearly-defined research question.
  • Locate, evaluate, and integrate appropriate sources accurately and fairly through paraphrase and direct quotation.
  • Critically engage sources through interpretation, analysis, and/or critique in service of developing and supporting logical, well-defined claims.
  • Document sources with in-text and works cited citations following current MLA, APA, or Chicago Manual of Style guidelines or other methods as appropriate to the rhetorical situation.

These course objectives, we like to point out to students, are written to a specific audience—namely, teachers of college composition and the different institutions our students might transfer to (so this course might satisfy another school’s required first-year composition course).

With that in mind, we think that it’s important that you, as the student of this course, start to think about what these objectives actually mean to you so you know what to expect and so you’re prepared to be actively involved in the different activities in the course.

Furthermore, as we pointed out earlier – all students, at some point in their college careers, will benefit from a healthy toolbox of strategies and tools for sophisticated reading and writing tasks, so in order to be a metacognitive (self-aware) and active learner , a great place to start is to break down these objectives and reconsider them in your own language.

Course Tip: Unpack the Objectives

There’s been a subset of research in the field of rhetoric and composition that looks at writing across disciplines (fields of study) or writing across curricula / contexts. Among other things, scholars study the role of writing in different types of classes and how the concepts and tools that students learn (or don’t learn) in a writing class will transfer (or not) into their other classes. So how will this course benefit you? We think it will help you in all of your classes and in many other facets of your life: personal and professional, as well as academic.

When we talk about critical inquiry, we’re talking about the process of making meaning out of complicated and sometimes confusing or contradictory information (Objectives #6 and #4) in order to learn and understand issues you’re curious about. Many students have told us that learning to be more intentional and savvy researchers has changed the way they retrieve and process information in their classes and when they’re doing their own, personal, research.

Another of the major lessons we want students to take away from this course is that “good” writing may look very different from one setting or assignment to the next (this is a key part of Objective #3). And we remind students that many of them will develop a great deal of skills (and confidence) as they work their way through higher level courses if and when they can build on the concepts and ideas about writing we study in our course (Objective #2).

A message from a professor

So, what good is a 100-level course? Well, in this course, you can learn certain habits to cultivate, certain steps or processes to work through, and certain questions to ask when faced with new or difficult writing tasks. In fact, there’s a researcher in our field, David Russell, who has a great metaphor about writing skills and the limiting notion that there are strict writing “rules” or “tools” that will help a student throughout all their future writing tasks. We’ll simplify this a bit, but Russell basically points out that if you’re good at one kind of sport (say football), you have certain “ball-handling” skills that likely make you so good at that sport. But if you were to try to apply those same skills to a game of ping-pong or golf, you’re not likely to be as successful, right?

Similarly, you’ll learn as we study texts in this class, there can be just as big a difference among a successful paragraph on a resume, one in a short news article, or one in a well-researched, “academic” argument essay. It may be a bummer that we can’t teach you the “rules” of “good” writing. But what we can explore in our College Composition course are the right kinds of questions and considerations to pose and evaluate that will help you better understand how start to write when you’re given new tasks in the future (Objectives #1-#4).

A message from a professor

What to Expect

Students, we’ve learned, hate “busy work” and often just want to know “how long it has to be.” Students also prefer clear guidelines for homework assignments, and they seem to really love a detailed rubric.

Well: we have some good news and some “bad” news:

First, the good news : basically, if you treat all of the assignments in this course seriously–that is, if you tackle them thoughtfully and produce meaningful texts for all of the activities you’re assigned–you’ll be building your major assignments step-by-step so that you’ll never have to cram, rush, and pull an “all-nighter” starting from scratch. Phew, right?

More good news : we use Canvas assignments and modules in Canvas to present and collect all of the resources you’ll need to be successful in this course. We’ll present detailed assignments with what we believe to be clear and detailed instructions – it’s just up to you to 1) keep on top of your assignments, their due dates, and their expectations 2) learn how to navigate Canvas and check your HCC email for announcements, and 3) ask for clarification and help when you need it (including reaching out to HCC campus resources like tutoring at the Composition and Literature Center or the Learning Assistance Center!).

And the “bad” news? Well, sometimes you might come across assignments that aren’t so clear-cut, or that have less detailed instructions than you’re used to seeing. Or, you may be assigned an essay that contains a holistic, comprehensive rubric rather than a point-by-point rubric. While this might feel a bit unsettling at first, think of it this way: you’re actually being empowered . When an assignment has fewer criteria, it can feel a lot less limiting, and you’ve been given an opportunity to own it. So, take the reins, think critically, be creative, and explore new possibilities with your coursework. That said, keep in mind that it’s perfectly normal to feel stuck or confused from time to time . If you’d like clarification on an assignment, don’t be afraid to send your professor a message in Canvas; your active engagement with the course material will surely impress them!

A message from a professor

A note on your homework for this course:

Thinking is invisible. Unlike training as an athlete, running laps or lifting weights, where you can measure your pace, your times, and your actual improvements, thinking—and growing as a thinker–isn’t quite as visible. So in college, when you’re told you should likely spend 3 or more hours working outside of class for every hour that a class actually meets, this is when the invisible thinking happens. Now, rereading an article over and over and never feeling like you’re making progress is a terrible feeling. Much like the pressure or stress of sitting in front of a blank word document and trying to come up with a great opening line. If you aren’t making progress, or don’t feel like you’re making progress, it can be easy to want to give up or just turn in what seems to meet the bare minimum. However, spending time working through difficult texts will actually help you process and understand those texts when you have the right set of tools—questions that help you analyze and take that text apart, for example, will help you make the time you spend on your homework more meaningful and useful!

What Students Say

What does this thinking look like in action? Your teacher is probably going to ask you to reflect, to explain, to analyze multiple different assignments. First, make sure you understand what is being asked of you by these different instructions (reflect – reexamine and reevaluate; explain – take the ideas and concepts and put them in your own words, clarify the ideas, take time to fully process them; analyze – identify different parts of a text, perhaps, and try to understand it more fully by evaluating or processing those different parts). Secondly, set out to meet those instructions fully by working through assignments in steps, using plenty of details and examples to support your ideas and your claims, and writing clearly so your ideas are fully understood by your reader – your teacher or other students.

The Role of Sources

In this course, you’ll be working with a variety of sources . Sources come in many forms. Many sources are text based– articles, interviews, and the like–while others rely on visual communication (photos, graphics, etc.). Often, you’ll find that online sources, such as websites, contain a combination of text and images. Expect to encounter sources on a regular basis in your assignments. For example, you might have a homework assignment that asks you to read and respond to an article, or you may be tasked with writing an essay that involves conducting online research.

Things to Remember When You’re Working with Sources

  • Consider your intentions. Sometimes, your purpose will be to find sources that support your specific claims and ideas. In these situations, sources should be chosen wisely and with a specific purpose in mind. Knowing why you’re using a source often influences how effectively you can integrate that source into your writing.
  • At the same time, be open to a variety of perspectives. When possible, try not to limit yourself to a fixed list of sources, and resist the urge to go hunting only for information that confirms your predetermined ideas. Instead, allow for possibilities that you hadn’t considered, and aim to investigate and articulate your own perspective as you interact with the perspectives of sources.
  • Have conversations with your sources. Your relationship with a given source should resemble a dialogue. Don’t just take a source at face value. Rather than positioning your sources as unquestioned authorities, or as backup that “proves” your argument, approach them with a critical eye, ask questions, and comment on what they say, using “I” statements to distinguish your perspective from theirs (yes, you can use “I”!).
  • Be a responsible researcher. The sources that you choose should be credible, reliable, and unbiased. You’ll learn more about this as you practice evaluating sources throughout this course.

How to Succeed: Metacognition and Meaningful Engagement

Meta, basically, means an awareness of something.

Cognition has to do with thinking and understanding.

So metacognition is an awareness of your own learning, thinking, and comprehension – being metacognitive means you’re being a self-aware student. Teachers assign metacognitive assignments to help students pause and take stock of both their processes and their products, what they’re producing in their classes. These are often reflection assignments, as in: reflect on major concepts from our first unit – what concepts did you learn and which ones were you best able to apply to your own work?

We’ve already talked about how you’ll be engaged in the act of making meaning and contributing to conversations through Critical Inquiry in this course, but you’ll also want to pay attention to yourself—how you’re developing strengths and recognizing weaknesses in your work habits, your writing processes, and in your final products. You’ll reflect metacognitively on your reading and your writing.

A message from a professor

Reflecting on your reading will help you determine which strategies are most effective for increasing your reading comprehension. As a successful college reader, you will need to adjust your use of reading strategies depending on the difficulty of the text and your purpose for reading it. Having a toolbox of reading strategies that work well for you will help you successfully monitor your comprehension and troubleshoot problems as they arise. You will want to continue to identify and strengthen the strategies that are working best for you and eliminate the ones that are least effective.

As a writer, reflecting will help you pay attention to your progress, your struggles, your strengths, and your weaknesses. Additionally, by considering different assignments and tasks (in this course and across courses) you will be more likely to transfer your learning and find similarities across assignments that help you to be more prepared and more confident.

Once you start recognizing patterns, hiccups, problems, solutions, and good questions to ask yourself, you’ll be more involved in your learning–and you’ll be better prepared to tackle more challenging assignments. Remember: learning takes time. Everyone has to struggle through difficult tasks. What matters in the end is that we can look back and see how we were able to conquer those challenges–what tools we used and what strategies we employed.

What Students Say

Finally, much of what separates those who succeed in College Composition from those who don’t is just plain doing the work. Some of you are already strong writers, others not so much, but regardless of performance in your previous courses, the content of this course is likely almost entirely new, which means that those of you who were successful in the past will still have much to learn, while those who may have struggled will suddenly find yourselves on a more level playing field. The assignment prompts, for example, will ask you to do things in writing that you’ve likely never been asked to do before, and even the prompts themselves might be difficult to understand at first. In such moments, it helps to focus on the operations–on action words like “reflect,” “analyze,” and “compose.” But it also helps to plan in advance for the fact that the writing task is never as simple as it first appears, so leaving yourself ample time to complete the assignments is the first step. In general, whether you are a strong reader and writer or an aspiring one, success in this course requires consistent engagement and presence, keeping up with the assignments, and taking advantage of the resources available to you, such as conferencing with your instructor and visiting the Composition and Literature Center.

Course Tip: Be Mindful of Time Management

Accelerated Learning Program (ALP)

ALP courses are designed to allow students who qualify, to skip the developmental writing or reading course and move directly into college composition, saving those students both time and money by allowing them to complete their academic credits faster. ALP differs from the traditional college composition course in that students meet for four hours a week instead of three. The extra hour of instruction will help students master academic writing skills. Students in ALP cover the same topics and adhere to the same requirements as students in traditional college composition courses, including formal arguments, documentation, and research. If you are not currently enrolled in an ALP section but think you might benefit from doing so, speak to your instructor within the first week of class.

English as a Second Language (ESL)

ESL sections of English 121 are designed for students who are multilingual and speak English as a second or other language. ESL sections of ENGL 121 have the same course content as other sections of ENGL 121 (and there is no distinction on the transcript), but the ESL sections are designed and taught by instructors specialized in second-language instruction. ESL sections (with sufficient enrollment) also utilize a lab instructor, who offers additional support and feedback. If you are not currently enrolled in an ESL section but think you might benefit from doing so, speak to your instructor within the first week of class.

About This Text

This textbook is an Open Educational Resource (OER). OERs are typically authored by several contributors, who have compiled and remixed content from various sources. What does that mean for you? Well, it means that you’re being provided with some of the most relevant and helpful content, which has been hand-picked to give you the best possible learning experience. As you make your way through this textbook, you’ll notice that the chapters and sections often vary by author, style, length, and format. Just like your favorite customized beverage at the local coffee shop, this textbook has been tailored to meet your interests and needs so that you can be successful in College Composition.

Speaking of success…to get the most of this textbook, you are encouraged to be an active reader and thinker. What does it mean to be an active reader? Simply put, an active reader engages, reacts to, and interacts with a text in meaningful ways. While reading, an active reader thinks critically, asks questions, and reacts to what the text says both implicitly and explicitly.

One of the most effective strategies for active reading is to annotate , or mark up the text as you read. Annotating helps you to make important connections that enhance your understanding of the material and help you retain what you have learned. You may already have some familiarity and perhaps even some prior experience with annotation. Highlighting, underlining, and circling key words and phrases, writing notes on the page — if you’ve ever done these things, you’ve annotated a text!

Following are our recommendations for how to annotate this textbook.

If You’d Like to Annotate On Your Screen:

  • Using your device, navigate to https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/criticalreadingcriticalwriting/ . Select “Download this book” and a drop-down menu will appear. The drop-down menu contains a list of format options for downloading the textbook.
  • From the drop-down menu, select the format option that is best suited for your device. Here are some tips for choosing a suitable format from the drop-down menu:
  • If you have a computer that contains Adobe Acrobat DC or a similar PDF editing application, select Digital PDF .
  • The EPUB and MOBI formats are supported by many devices, including mobile phones, tablets (such as iPad), and eReaders (such as Kindle and Nook). Some devices allow for read-only by default, so you may need to obtain an additional application that will allow you to edit the textbook file.

After you download and open the textbook on your device, use your application’s built-in tools to highlight key content and add your own notes to refer back to later. Tip: In addition to annotating directly on the page, it’s a great idea to jot down notes in a separate notebook or document.

Note: Check with your instructor to see whether they have a preferred annotation method that they recommend. For instance, if your instructor has provided access to a web-based annotation application , such as hypothes.is or NowComment, you can use that application to annotate the textbook directly in your web browser.

If You’d Prefer to Annotate on Paper:

  • From the drop-down menu, select the Print_PDF format option to download the printable textbook. Tip: Before printing, check to be sure that you have enough ink and paper in your printer!

If you don’t have access to a printer, you can order a printed copy of this textbook for a reasonable fee. To do this, navigate to https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/criticalreadingcriticalwriting/ , select the “Buy Book” link, and follow the prompts to purchase a printed copy of the textbook.

This chapter, “Welcome to College Composition,” by Elizabeth Caruso, Sarah Johnson, and Nicholas Learned, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Critical Reading, Critical Writing Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Johnson; Beth Caruso; and Nic Learned is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Reading & Writing Purposes

Introduction: critical thinking, reading, & writing, critical thinking.

The phrase “critical thinking” is often misunderstood. “Critical” in this case does not mean finding fault with an action or idea. Instead, it refers to the ability to understand an action or idea through reasoning. According to the website SkillsYouNeed [1]:

Critical thinking might be described as the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking.

In essence, critical thinking requires you to use your ability to reason. It is about being an active learner rather than a passive recipient of information.

Critical thinkers rigorously question ideas and assumptions rather than accepting them at face value. They will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments, and findings represent the entire picture and are open to finding that they do not.

Critical thinkers will identify, analyze, and solve problems systematically rather than by intuition or instinct.

Someone with critical thinking skills can:

  • Understand the links between ideas.
  • Determine the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas.
  • Recognize, build, and appraise arguments.
  • Identify inconsistencies and errors in reasoning.
  • Approach problems in a consistent and systematic way.
  • Reflect on the justification of their own assumptions, beliefs and values.

Read more at:  https://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/critical-thinking.html

essay critical reading

Critical thinking—the ability to develop your own insights and meaning—is a basic college learning goal. Critical reading and writing strategies foster critical thinking, and critical thinking underlies critical reading and writing.

Critical Reading

Critical reading builds on the basic reading skills expected for college.

College Readers’ Characteristics

  • College readers are willing to spend time reflecting on the ideas presented in their reading assignments. They know the time is well-spent to enhance their understanding.
  • College readers are able to raise questions while reading. They evaluate and solve problems rather than merely compile a set of facts to be memorized.
  • College readers can think logically. They are fact-oriented and can review the facts dispassionately. They base their judgments on ideas and evidence.
  • College readers can recognize error in thought and persuasion as well as recognize good arguments.
  • College readers are skeptical. They understand that not everything in print is correct. They are diligent in seeking out the truth.

Critical Readers’ Characteristics

  • Critical readers are open-minded. They seek alternative views and are open to new ideas that may not necessarily agree with their previous thoughts on a topic. They are willing to reassess their views when new or discordant evidence is introduced and evaluated.
  • Critical readers are in touch with their own personal thoughts and ideas about a topic. Excited about learning, they are eager to express their thoughts and opinions.
  • Critical readers are able to identify arguments and issues. They are able to ask penetrating and thought-provoking questions to evaluate ideas.
  • Critical readers are creative. They see connections between topics and use knowledge from other disciplines to enhance their reading and learning experiences.
  • Critical readers develop their own ideas on issues, based on careful analysis and response to others’ ideas.

The video below, although geared toward students studying for the SAT exam (Scholastic Aptitude Test used for many colleges’ admissions), offers a good, quick overview of the concept and practice of critical reading.

Critical Reading & Writing

College reading and writing assignments often ask you to react to, apply, analyze, and synthesize information. In other words, your own informed and reasoned ideas about a subject take on more importance than someone else’s ideas, since the purpose of college reading and writing is to think critically about information.

Critical thinking involves questioning. You ask and answer questions to pursue the “careful and exact evaluation and judgment” that the word “critical” invokes (definition from The American Heritage Dictionary ). The questions simply change depending on your critical purpose. Different critical purposes are detailed in the next pages of this text.

However, here’s a brief preview of the different types of questions you’ll ask and answer in relation to different critical reading and writing purposes.

When you react to a text you ask:

  • “What do I think?” and
  • “Why do I think this way?”

e.g., If I asked and answered these “reaction” questions about the topic assimilation of immigrants to the U.S. , I might create the following main idea statement, which I could then develop in an essay:  I think that assimilation has both positive and negative effects because, while it makes life easier within the dominant culture, it also implies that the original culture is of lesser value.

When you apply text information you ask:

  • “How does this information relate to the real world?”

e.g., If I asked and answered this “application” question about the topic assimilation , I might create the following main idea statement, which I could then develop in an essay:  During the past ten years, a group of recent emigrants has assimilated into the local culture; the process of their assimilation followed certain specific stages.

When you analyze text information you ask:

  • “What is the main idea?”
  • “What do I want to ‘test’ in the text to see if the main idea is justified?” (supporting ideas, type of information, language), and
  • “What pieces of the text relate to my ‘test?'”

e.g., If I asked and answered these “analysis” questions about the topic immigrants to the United States , I might create the following main idea statement, which I could then develop in an essay: Although Lee (2009) states that “segmented assimilation theory asserts that immigrant groups may assimilate into one of many social sectors available in American society, instead of restricting all immigrant groups to adapting into one uniform host society,” other theorists have shown this not to be the case with recent immigrants in certain geographic areas.

When you synthesize information from many texts you ask:

  • “What information is similar and different in these texts?,” and
  • “What pieces of information fit together to create or support a main idea?”

e.g., If I asked and answered these “synthesis” questions about the topic immigrants to the U.S. , I might create the following main idea statement, which I could then develop by using examples and information from many text articles as evidence to support my idea: Immigrants who came to the United States during the immigration waves in the early to mid 20th century traditionally learned English as the first step toward assimilation, a process that was supported by educators. Now, both immigrant groups and educators are more focused on cultural pluralism than assimilation, as can be seen in educators’ support of bilingual education. However, although bilingual education heightens the child’s reasoning and ability to learn, it may ultimately hinder the child’s sense of security within the dominant culture if that culture does not value cultural pluralism as a whole.

essay critical reading

Critical reading involves asking and answering these types of questions in order to find out how the information “works” as opposed to just accepting and presenting the information that you read in a text. Critical writing involves recording your insights into these questions and offering your own interpretation of a concept or issue, based on the meaning you create from those insights.

  • Crtical Thinking, Reading, & Writing. Authored by : Susan Oaks, includes material adapted from TheSkillsYouNeed and Reading 100; attributions below. Project : Introduction to College Reading & Writing. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
  • Critical Thinking. Provided by : TheSkillsYouNeed. Located at : https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright . License Terms : Quoted from website: The use of material found at skillsyouneed.com is free provided that copyright is acknowledged and a reference or link is included to the page/s where the information was found. Read more at: https://www.skillsyouneed.com/
  • The Reading Process. Authored by : Scottsdale Community College Reading Faculty. Provided by : Maricopa Community College. Located at : https://learn.maricopa.edu/courses/904536/files/32966438?module_item_id=7198326 . Project : Reading 100. License : CC BY: Attribution
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Dec. 5, 2019

Better writing assignments start with critical reading praxis.

writing

Laying the Foundation: Graduate Student Projects in Teaching & Learning

In this blog feature, we present the work of Rice graduate students completing coursework in our Certificate in Teaching and Learning .

Today, we’re featuring the project of Mallory Pladus, a PhD Candidate in English at Rice. As part of her coursework in UNIV 501 “Research on Teaching and Learning,” Mallory pursued the research question “What types of reading and writing assignments promote critical literacy?” Based on her findings she compiled an annotated bibliography, wrote a synthesis of the research, and developed a research poster. We asked Mallory to share her findings and analysis through this blog post.

In the spring I conducted a research project with the CTE that began as an effort to learn more about writing assignments in undergraduate courses, specifically for English and writing-focused courses, but with an interest in assignments across disciplines as well. I approached the project from the vantage point of an instructor at a loss, remembering having puzzled over the question of what kind of writing work to assign when I had the chance to experiment with curriculum design as a first-time grad student instructor.

In that teaching experience, I wanted to take seriously the question of how my course could be evidence of a pedagogical cornerstone: to help student writers feel more confident in how their thinking comes through on the page. I thought a lot about the standard essay form, its strengths and weaknesses: it combines lessons on argumentation, literary evidence, and form; it’s (rotely?) institutionalized across disciplines. In the research I did last term, I was still less interested in deposing the essay, and more interested in researching answers to these two questions: What types of assignments help students arrive at a point where they can claim, with a feeling of authenticity, in this paper, I argue that… ? And what are the major principles in composition pedagogy that might help me and other instructors create more interesting and more effective assignments for students?

The findings were elucidating toward those ends. The field of composition pedagogy shows the positive influence of genre studies, which encourages instructors to make explicit the social function , the rhetorical situation , and the discourse community of the genres they’ve assigned.[1] Instructors who opt to not buck the traditional essay assignment, for example, should unpack with students who the essay is for, what conventions readers expect from it, and why the genre exists at all. I especially like the call to encourage students to write to a real or imagined community beyond the instructor. I remember valuing a version of this advice I received as an undergrad writer - to keep front and center the questions of who (is this for?) and why (write this at all?).

Above all, though, the standout lesson from the field - discussed as repetitiously as the content of the advice itself - is that student writers benefit most from writing early and often, through assignments that are sequenced, frequent, and recursive. I think most instructors know this, but could stand to be reminded. Effective assignments encompass opportunities for reflection, metacognition, and revision. They might call for post-script writing, for example; they might sequence an essay in staged parts; they might compel students to submit revisions after dialoguing with peers. In an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Doug Hesse, he summarily states the logic subtending all of these principles: “Students learn to write by writing.”[2]

For me, these conventional precepts - though helpful - omit one key term. Don’t students also learn to write by reading? One of my favorite things about teaching English is that part of the disciplinary groundwork is to attend carefully to language - to interpret texts as a series of decisions to a set of ends. For writing instruction, this helps. We impart to students the significance of these decisions, and we get to establish close engagement with language as a course norm. Hesse does acknowledge this aspect of successful writing classrooms too, as he notes that student writing benefits when students feel equipped to read texts as deep examples - not just of how to turn a phrase (though that too), but of carefully plotted rhetorical moves.

From experience, as a graduate fellow at Rice’s CAPC, I’m often reminded that my job to help a student improve a piece of writing comes down to making sure the student has really understood the assigned reading. When I think of common areas for improvement - an essay repeats key claims, doesn’t engage thoughtfully or confidently with source materials, lacks overall heft - they all tend to signal that a student’s first act in revision should be to return to the text. Through this work consulting on student essays, I’ve also learned that students frequently collapse the terms “critical” and “criticize”; when asked to “critique” an author’s argument, for example, students proceed to expose its flaws. These two observations suggest a need for and one potential barrier to implementing critical reading as part of our writing instruction. The pedagogy scholars, Robert Diyanni and Anton Borst, whose work I describe more below, define critical reading well: it is the capacity to “analyze a text, understand its logic, evaluate its evidence, interpret it creatively, and ask searching questions of it” (3).

Toward my first research question, about how to help students write with a greater feeling of authenticity, critical reading offers one answer. Before students can fill in the blanks that follow the template “ In this paper, I argue that …” they need to form a considered response to a source text, and this work begins with meaningful comprehension. Further, the language that Diyanni and Borst use to define critical reading resonates with this goal of authentic argumentation. As they highlight the abilities to “interpret [a text] creatively” and to “ask searching questions of it,” they describe the act of reading from a specific subject position. Course writing assignments (“ I will argue”) then allow students to develop ideas that began with reading.

My second research question pertained to the field of composition studies. In the research I conducted on writing assignments, I was surprised to not find more content on the relationship between critical reading and critical writing. There are, however, two notable exceptions to this point - one old, one new. In a study from 1990, Reading-to-Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process , Linda Flower, et. al. explain that according to research in cognitive learning, the mind distinguishes between reading to do something and reading to learn something (6). When a person reads a set of instructions, for instance, they scan for usable content to extract. Conversely, the act of reading with a bent toward writing, “is guided by the need to produce a text of one’s own” (7).

In Critical Reading Across the Curriculum , DiYanni and Borst make a case for the significance of critical reading, with greater implications for pedagogy. They explain that CR entails two primary parts: to read responsibly (to accurately attend to a text) and to read responsively (to talk back to a text via marginalia and annotation). The contributor Pat C. Hoy argues that “We would do well to clarify for our students this entwining relationship, reminding them...that the most persuasive writing is predicated on acts of clear-headed critical reading” (25). Hoy offers the practical example of one such reading assignment as a precursor to writing: guide students to distill an essay; have them write one cogent sentence in the margin to capture the meaning of each paragraph.

Both Reading to Write and Critical Reading Across the Curriculum stress the importance of meeting a text on its own terms - of understanding its major moves and claims (as opposed to quickly mining it, and before beginning the work of critiquing it). Both provoke the need for instructors to prompt students to read better, with an eye toward writing. In addition to the example Hoy provides of the distillation assignment, instructors could experiment with reading journals, dialectical notebooks (that stage a conversation between the reader and the source text), and descriptive outlining (in which students unpack both what a text says and how it says it).[3] These examples attest to the overlaps between reading and writing assignments. Similarly, as we emphasize the importance of drafting, editing, and revising in the writing classroom, we can also emphasize active reading and active reading assignments as the first stage of the writing work we already know to teach as a process.

[1] From Dan Melzer’s Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (2014). For more on genre theory, see Mary Soliday’s Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments Across the Disciplines (2011).

[2] “We Know What Works in Teaching Composition” (2017).

[3] See Susan M. Leist, Writing to Teach; Writing to Learn in Higher Education (University Press of America, 2006), for a more detailed description of these and other assignments.

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Ania Kowalik

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essay critical reading

Why Students Should Practice Critical Reading

How often do people read these days?  According to Cartridge People , 41% of people in the UK spend less than an hour a week reading or listening to books. The pandemic has increased the amount of people reading, and with it, the need to read critically.

What is critical reading and why should people, especially students, practice it? Read on to find out.

What is critical reading?

Critical reading is an act of active reading . While many students may consume a lot of storybooks or online text, they often do so without questioning the text or analysing it. Critical reading creates a deeper understanding of the text, as you would analyse, interpret and evaluate it. For example, one may look into a news report about a traditional festival from a cultural perspective and think about how the text represented the event to their audience. 

Of course, critical reading is not something that should be practiced all the time, as it requires a lot of mental exercise, but can be a good habit to establish when encountering text. Reading is still a good source of mental stimulation and entertainment. However, asking questions like ‘Why is this text written?’ or ‘Why is this text written in this way?’ not only helps students understand how a text works, it can also improve their writing.

Why should students practice critical reading?

Without putting critical reading or thinking into practice, some students simply do not question what they read . This can lead them to miss out important information or implications of the text, leaving them susceptible to being manipulated. Take a look at advertisements for example, most advertisements use persuasive language to sell their product or service to the audience. Questioning the claims or promises in the ad is an example of critical reading.

Students who read critically will be able to separate opinion from fact . This skill is particularly important not only in reading but for discussions as well. Students who are able to distinguish them can extract key information quickly and avoid being tricked by misrepresented opinions. They will be able to sort out valid and relevant information depending on the topic, avoiding fallacies and protecting them from fake news . 

Reflecting on their own biases and opinions is also part of critical reading. Students get to think about what assumptions they are making when reading something. This helps them challenge their own thoughts and opens their mind to newer ideas and perspectives. This aspect of critical reading comes hand-in-hand with critical thinking, an important, sought-after skill. Read about how to think critically here . 

Like critical thinking, critical reading should be put into practice from upper primary level onwards. StarWorks is our comprehensive enrichment programme which focuses on critical reading, critical thinking, writing and speaking. Sign up today to be eligible for an early bird discount! The offer will end on 1 April 2021.

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  • How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

  • An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
  • A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
  • A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

  • Who is telling the story?
  • How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

  • Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
  • Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
  • Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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essay critical reading

Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, August 14). How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide. Scribbr. Retrieved March 5, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/literary-analysis/

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Critical Reading Is Important: Why?

essay critical reading

Reading is a proven way to improve knowledge and increase mental abilities. These benefits are enjoyed by those who read for pleasure and those studying in school. It has been shown that those who engage in critical reading have an increase in these benefits.

So, why is critical reading important? It plays a crucial role in your development as a reader and is an excellent workout for the brain. Reading has critical effects on mental development. If you are looking for how to improve critical reading skills, we have an article dedicated to that topic . It offers valuable tips and provides detailed information on why critical thinking is essential to reading.

What Does Reading Critically Mean?

Critical reading refers to the ability to read content and understand the material while determining whether it is fact or fiction. It involves analyzing and evaluating all content. You will have to judge the credibility of what has been written instead of simply assuming it is true. The process involves reading content and then questioning what has been said so you can determine validity. This is an essential skill that will be needed if you are a student who needs to conduct research. It can help in selecting different sources that will be referenced in your own research.

How Is This Important and Effective?

Having the ability to comprehend and understand what is being read is a skill that all students will require. Why is critical viewing, listening, and reading important? It can help enhance the ability to understand and is essential for higher earning. Successful students will not take things at face value. They will use these skills to assess what information is essential and whether it has the appropriate facts.

What is the most crucial requirement for critical reading and writing? This is a question that all students should be able to answer. The main requirement is identifying fact from fiction. You also must be able to look at any arguments presented and determine whether they are supported by valid research.

Beyond mastering the art of critical reading, learning about services like Babbel and the associated Babbel cost could also be beneficial. Babbel offers a wide range of language learning courses, which could help in developing your critical reading skills in multiple languages.

Why Do I Need Critical Reading Skills?

As a reader, having specific skills will help you better understand the text. Instead of simply skimming words, you will benefit from enhanced comprehension. Those who are critical thinkers and readers will seek knowledge. Why is it important to have critical reading skills? As a student, you can raise questions from the content and then be able to evaluate and solve any problems. You will also be able to base all judgments on evidence.

These skills will also help readers identify various arguments and ask thought-provoking questions. This later allows you to develop ideas based on analysis. Instead of simply accepting the information that is presented, having these skills allows for the development of an individualized interpretation of ideas.

As a student applying for college, critical reading will be part of your SAT exam. After completing the exam, you will start the application process for getting into the desired school. One thing that is important at this time is deadlines. Some schools will have a priority deadline. What is a priority deadline ? This is the time in which you must submit an application for consideration.

When it comes to college admissions, there is a difference between rolling admission and standard decisions. If you do not meet the priority deadline, your application will be considered on a rolling basis.

Is rolling admission the same as a regular decision? No. Rolling admission refers to the review of applications as they are sent in. There are no specific deadlines in place. With a regular decision process, you have to submit an application within a specific time frame. We have more detailed information on rolling admissions and priority deadlines on our blog .

Important to Determine Arguments

Critical reading in college

As a student, critical reading will be important when completing academic assignments. You have to develop your own arguments when writing papers and these skills allow this to be done. By reading texts multiple times, focus can be placed on different aspects. The information that is presented can be analyzed and evidence can be used to support your argument.

When reading, you will have to determine whether the information included can support an argument with facts and data. Why are critical reading skills important? Instead of accepting a claim that is made by another, critical readers will have the skills to examine arguments and see things from both sides. By being able to constantly evaluate what is being read, you can determine if an argument is logical and backed by proper research.

Improving critical reading skills can be an asset for every student. In addition to understanding why critical reading is important, explore strategies on how to improve critical reading . The skills you’ll gain are not only applicable in academic contexts but also invaluable for everyday life.

Critical Reading and Assumptions and Values

When reading any content, it is important to analyze any assumptions that are made by an author. An Assumption is something that an author believes is true in order for them to make an argument. One must have the ability to question any assumptions and determine if it has value. Value is something that one person thinks has importance. Why are values important to known in critical reading? One must understand an argument of an author and use their values to determine whether the standpoint is factual.

Uses in Conducting Scientific Research

When conducting research and completing scientific research papers, this form of thinking will be essential. No matter how technical the subject matter may be, a writer will ace to make a variety of decisions during the research process. This will include determining what information to include in a paper. If you are wondering why is critical reading and thinking important, you will quickly see how effective it is when conducting research.

As you prepare to conduct research, you will have to make use of different sources and the writings of other people. Having appropriate skills will enable one to perform good research and know exactly what to include to make a strong argument. Some features of critical reading that will be used when performing research include:

  • Examining evidence or current arguments
  • Checking the influence of such evidence
  • Learning the limitations of focus
  • Examining interpretations
  • Deciding how to use researched arguments or opinions

As we delve into the importance of critical reading, considering the safety of online tutoring platforms becomes pertinent. Assessing the question, is online tutoring safe , helps ensure that the learning environment is conducive and secure, adding another layer of confidence as you engage in the learning process.

Critical Thinking and Writing

Critical thinking is a life skill that is learned and it is the ability to understand and evaluate information that is read. Why is reading an important critical thinking skill? The more you read, the more you can analyze information and filter that using your own thought process. This can be a powerful tool in the development of being a critical thinker. As a writer, this skill can help you present ideas and concepts that will stimulate readers.

Critical thinking is what will define your writing style . The best writers are those who have the ability to think critically. If you are wondering why is critical thinking important in reading and writing, it is because it paves the road for a writer to create a story or article that presents an argument clearly. It allows writers to choose appropriate words and ideas that will convey the message with the greatest impact.

Why Ambiguity is Important

Ambiguity plays a key role in being a critical thinker or reader. This refers to words or phrases having various meanings. One must force themselves to look for ambiguity. Any term will be ambiguous when it has a meaning that is uncertain and will require further clarification before any judgment can be made. When making an argument, ambiguity should be avoided. You want clear and concise information that will support a view or an opinion.

If any words or phrases need clarification, they will be considered to be ambiguous. It is essential to take the time to read content and examine it carefully so you can determine the meaning of any phrases. If that meaning is still uncertain, an important ambiguity has been detected. As a student, this will require an extensive vocabulary. You need to know the different meanings of words and determine whether the information supports an argument.

If you need help with improving your critical reading skills, consider hiring an online tutor. We have a list of the top ones here .

The most effective communicators will ensure clarity. They will review what has been written to make sure no cases of ambiguity are present. This allows for a strong argument to be presented and removes any doubt a reader may have.

essay critical reading

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A soldier in camouflage gear in a forest whose trees have been largely stripped of leaves.

The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin

For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.

A Ukrainian Army soldier in a forest near Russian lines this month. A C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases has been constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border. Credit... Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

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Adam Entous

By Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz

Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz conducted more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, several other European countries and the United States to report this story.

  • Published Feb. 25, 2024 Updated Feb. 28, 2024

Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.

But that is above ground.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.

The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military.

There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the C.I.A.

“One hundred and ten percent,” Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy, a top intelligence commander, said in an interview at the base.

Now entering the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.

But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

A part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, in a field.

The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border. Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)

And the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.

The relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use.

“Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,” said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U.

The details of this intelligence partnership, many of which are being disclosed by The New York Times for the first time, have been a closely guarded secret for a decade.

In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the C.I.A. station in Kyiv could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.

Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the C.I.A. may have to scale back.

To try to reassure Ukrainian leaders, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, made a secret visit to Ukraine last Thursday, his 10th visit since the invasion.

From the outset, a shared adversary — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — brought the C.I.A. and its Ukrainian partners together. Obsessed with “losing” Ukraine to the West, Mr. Putin had regularly interfered in Ukraine’s political system, handpicking leaders he believed would keep Ukraine within Russia’s orbit, yet each time it backfired, driving protesters into the streets.

Mr. Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.

Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.

But the Times investigation found that Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic. The C.I.A. didn’t push its way into Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.

Yet a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the C.I.A. and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, then Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, arrived at a meeting with the C.I.A.’s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack of top-secret files.

That initial tranche contained secrets about the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, including detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine designs. Before long, teams of C.I.A. officers were regularly leaving his office with backpacks full of documents.

“We understood that we needed to create the conditions of trust,” General Kondratiuk said.

As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington’s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did.

“The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv — our station there, the operation out of Ukraine — became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia,” said a former senior American official. “We couldn’t get enough of it.”

This is the untold story of how it all happened.

A Cautious Beginning

The C.I.A.’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Millions of Ukrainians had just overrun the country’s pro-Kremlin government and the president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia. In the tumult, a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power.

The government’s new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, arrived at the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency and found a pile of smoldering documents in the courtyard. Inside, many of the computers had been wiped or were infected with Russian malware.

“It was empty. No lights. No leadership. Nobody was there,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said in an interview.

He went to an office and called the C.I.A. station chief and the local head of MI6. It was near midnight but he summoned them to the building, asked for help in rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership. “That’s how it all started,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said.

The situation quickly became more dangerous. Mr. Putin seized Crimea. His agents fomented separatist rebellions that would become a war in the country’s east. Ukraine was on war footing, and Mr. Nalyvaichenko appealed to the C.I.A. for overhead imagery and other intelligence to help defend its territory.

With violence escalating, an unmarked U.S. government plane touched down at an airport in Kyiv carrying John O. Brennan, then the director of the C.I.A. He told Mr. Nalyvaichenko that the C.I.A. was interested in developing a relationship but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

To the C.I.A., the unknown question was how long Mr. Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western government would be around. The C.I.A. had been burned before in Ukraine.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine gained independence and then veered between competing political forces: those that wanted to remain close to Moscow and those that wanted to align with the West. During a previous stint as spy chief, Mr. Nalyvaichenko started a similar partnership with the C.I.A., which dissolved when the country swung back toward Russia.

Now Mr. Brennan explained that to unlock C.I.A. assistance the Ukrainians had to prove that they could provide intelligence of value to the Americans. They also needed to purge Russian spies; the domestic spy agency, the S.B.U., was riddled with them. (Case in point: The Russians quickly learned about Mr. Brennan’s supposedly secret visit. The Kremlin’s propaganda outlets published a photoshopped image of the C.I.A. director wearing a clown wig and makeup.)

Mr. Brennan returned to Washington, where advisers to President Barack Obama were deeply concerned about provoking Moscow. The White House crafted secret rules that infuriated the Ukrainians and that some inside the C.I.A. thought of as handcuffs. The rules barred intelligence agencies from providing any support to Ukraine that could be “reasonably expected” to have lethal consequences.

The result was a delicate balancing act. The C.I.A. was supposed to strengthen Ukraine’s intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never precisely clear, which created a persistent tension in the partnership.

In Kyiv, Mr. Nalyvaichenko picked a longtime aide, General Kondratiuk, to serve as head of counterintelligence, and they created a new paramilitary unit that was deployed behind enemy lines to conduct operations and gather intelligence that the C.I.A. or MI6 would not provide to them.

Known as the Fifth Directorate, this unit would be filled with officers born after Ukraine gained independence.

“They had no connection with Russia,” General Kondratiuk said. “They didn’t even know what the Soviet Union was.”

That summer, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, blew up in midair and crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. The Fifth Directorate produced telephone intercepts and other intelligence within hours of the crash that quickly placed responsibility on Russian-backed separatists.

The C.I.A. was impressed, and made its first meaningful commitment by providing secure communications gear and specialized training to members of the Fifth Directorate and two other elite units.

“The Ukrainians wanted fish and we, for policy reasons, couldn’t deliver that fish,” said a former U.S. official, referring to intelligence that could help them battle the Russians. “But we were happy to teach them how to fish and deliver fly-fishing equipment.”

A Secret Santa

In the summer of 2015, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, shook up the domestic service and installed an ally to replace Mr. Nalyvaichenko, the C.I.A.’s trusted partner. But the change created an opportunity elsewhere.

In the reshuffle, General Kondratiuk was appointed as the head of the country’s military intelligence agency, known as the HUR, where years earlier he had started his career. It would be an early example of how personal ties, more than policy shifts, would deepen the C.I.A.’s involvement in Ukraine.

Unlike the domestic agency, the HUR had the authority to collect intelligence outside the country, including in Russia. But the Americans had seen little value in cultivating the agency because it wasn’t producing any intelligence of value on the Russians — and because it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers.

Trying to build trust, General Kondratiuk arranged a meeting with his American counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency and handed over a stack of secret Russian documents. But senior D.I.A. officials were suspicious and discouraged building closer ties.

The general needed to find a more willing partner.

Months earlier, while still with the domestic agency, General Kondratiuk visited the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. In those meetings, he met a C.I.A. officer with a jolly demeanor and a bushy beard who had been tapped to become the next station chief in Kyiv.

After a long day of meetings, the C.I.A. took General Kondratiuk to a Washington Capitals hockey match, where he and the incoming station chief sat in a luxury box and loudly booed Alex Ovechkin, the team’s star player from Russia.

The station chief had not yet arrived when General Kondratiuk handed over to the C.I.A. the secret documents about the Russian Navy. “There’s more where this came from,” he promised, and the documents were sent off to analysts in Langley.

The analysts concluded the documents were authentic, and after the station chief arrived in Kyiv, the C.I.A. became General Kondratiuk’s primary partner.

General Kondratiuk knew he needed the C.I.A. to strengthen his own agency. The C.I.A. thought the general might be able to help Langley, too. It struggled to recruit spies inside Russia because its case officers were under heavy surveillance.

“For a Russian, allowing oneself to be recruited by an American is to commit the absolute, ultimate in treachery and treason,” General Kondratiuk said. “But for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it’s just friends talking over a beer.”

The new station chief began regularly visiting General Kondratiuk, whose office was decorated with an aquarium where yellow and blue fish — the national colors of Ukraine — swam circles around a model of a sunken Russian submarine. The two men became close, which drove the relationship between the two agencies, and the Ukrainians gave the new station chief an affectionate nickname: Santa Claus.

In January 2016, General Kondratiuk flew to Washington for meetings at Scattergood, an estate on the C.I.A. campus in Virginia where the agency often fetes visiting dignitaries. The agency agreed to help the HUR modernize, and to improve its ability to intercept Russian military communications. In exchange, General Kondratiuk agreed to share all of the raw intelligence with the Americans.

Now the partnership was real.

Operation Goldfish

Today, the narrow road leading to the secret base is framed by minefields, seeded as a line of defense in the weeks after Russia’s invasion. The Russian missiles that hit the base had seemingly shut it down, but just weeks later the Ukrainians returned.

With money and equipment provided by the C.I.A., crews under General Dvoretskiy’s command began to rebuild, but underground. To avoid detection, they only worked at night and when Russian spy satellites were not overhead. Workers also parked their cars a distance away from the construction site.

In the bunker, General Dvoretskiy pointed to communications equipment and large computer servers, some of which were financed by the C.I.A. He said his teams were using the base to hack into the Russian military’s secure communications networks.

“This is the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,” General Dvoretskiy told a Times journalist on a tour, adding that they were hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.

Another officer placed two recently produced maps on a table, as evidence of how Ukraine is tracking Russian activity around the world.

The first showed the overhead routes of Russian spy satellites traveling over central Ukraine. The second showed how Russian spy satellites are passing over strategic military installations — including a nuclear weapons facility — in the eastern and central United States.

The C.I.A. began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood, General Dvoretskiy said, providing encrypted radios and devices for intercepting secret enemy communications.

Beyond the base, the C.I.A. also oversaw a training program, carried out in two European cities, to teach Ukrainian intelligence officers how to convincingly assume fake personas and steal secrets in Russia and other countries that are adept at rooting out spies. The program was called Operation Goldfish, which derived from a joke about a Russian-speaking goldfish who offers two Estonians wishes in exchange for its freedom.

The punchline was that one of the Estonians bashed the fish’s head with a rock, explaining that anything speaking Russian could not be trusted.

The Operation Goldfish officers were soon deployed to 12 newly-built, forward operating bases constructed along the Russian border. From each base, General Kondratiuk said, the Ukrainian officers ran networks of agents who gathered intelligence inside Russia.

C.I.A. officers installed equipment at the bases to help gather intelligence and also identified some of the most skilled Ukrainian graduates of the Operation Goldfish program, working with them to approach potential Russian sources. These graduates then trained sleeper agents on Ukrainian territory meant to launch guerrilla operations in case of occupation.

It can often take years for the C.I.A. to develop enough trust in a foreign agency to begin conducting joint operations. With the Ukrainians it had taken less than six months. The new partnership started producing so much raw intelligence about Russia that it had to be shipped to Langley for processing.

But the C.I.A. did have red lines. It wouldn’t help the Ukrainians conduct offensive lethal operations.

“We made a distinction between intelligence collection operations and things that go boom,” a former senior U.S. official said.

‘This is Our Country’

It was a distinction that grated on the Ukrainians.

First, General Kondratiuk was annoyed when the Americans refused to provide satellite images from inside Russia. Soon after, he requested C.I.A. assistance in planning a clandestine mission to send HUR commandos into Russia to plant explosive devices at train depots used by the Russian military. If the Russian military sought to take more Ukrainian territory, Ukrainians could detonate the explosives to slow the Russian advance.

When the station chief briefed his superiors, they “lost their minds,” as one former official put it. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, called General Kondratiuk to make certain that mission was canceled and that Ukraine abided by the red lines forbidding lethal operations.

General Kondratiuk canceled the mission, but he also took a different lesson. “Going forward, we worked to not have discussions about these things with your guys,” he said.

Late that summer, Ukrainian spies discovered that Russian forces were deploying attack helicopters at an airfield on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, possibly to stage a surprise attack.

General Kondratiuk decided to send a team into Crimea to plant explosives at the airfield so they could be detonated if Russia moved to attack.

This time, he didn’t ask the C.I.A. for permission. He turned to Unit 2245, the commando force that received specialized military training from the C.I.A.’s elite paramilitary group, known as the Ground Department. The intent of the training was to teach defensive techniques, but C.I.A. officers understood that without their knowledge the Ukrainians could use the same techniques in offensive lethal operations.

At the time, the future head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, General Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was known for daring operations behind enemy lines and had deep ties to the C.I.A. The agency had trained him and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the right arm during fighting in the Donbas.

Disguised in Russian uniforms, then-Lt. Col. Budanov led commandos across a narrow gulf in inflatable speedboats, landing at night in Crimea.

But an elite Russian commando unit was waiting for them. The Ukrainians fought back, killing several Russian fighters, including the son of a general, before retreating to the shoreline, plunging into the sea and swimming for hours to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

It was a disaster. In a public address, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian fighters.

“There is no doubt that we will not let these things pass,” he said.

In Washington, the Obama White House was livid. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice president and a champion of assistance to Ukraine, called Ukraine’s president to angrily complain.

“It causes a gigantic problem,” Mr. Biden said in the call, a recording of which was leaked and published online. “All I’m telling you as a friend is that my making arguments here is a hell of a lot harder now.”

Some of Mr. Obama’s advisers wanted to shut the C.I.A. program down, but Mr. Brennan persuaded them that doing so would be self-defeating, given the relationship was starting to produce intelligence on the Russians as the C.I.A. was investigating Russian election meddling.

Mr. Brennan got on the phone with General Kondratiuk to again emphasize the red lines.

The general was upset. “This is our country,” he responded, according to a colleague. “It’s our war, and we’ve got to fight.”

The blowback from Washington cost General Kondratiuk his job. But Ukraine didn’t back down.

One day after General Kondratiuk was removed, a mysterious explosion in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, ripped through an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom de guerre, Motorola.

The C.I.A. soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that received C.I.A. training. Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency had even handed out commemorative patches to those involved, each one stitched with the word “Lift,” the British term for an elevator.

Again, some of Mr. Obama’s advisers were furious, but they were lame ducks — the presidential election pitting Donald J. Trump against Hillary Rodham Clinton was three weeks away — and the assassinations continued.

A team of Ukrainian agents set up an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a building in the occupied territories. It was directly across from the office of a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote trigger, they fired the launcher as soon as Givi entered his office, killing him, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

A shadow war was now in overdrive. The Russians used a car bomb to assassinate the head of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando force. The commander, Col. Maksim Shapoval, was on his way to meeting with C.I.A. officers in Kyiv when his car exploded.

At the colonel’s wake, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, stood in mourning beside the C.I.A. station chief. Later, C.I.A. officers and their Ukrainian counterparts toasted Colonel Shapoval with whiskey shots.

“For all of us,” General Kondratiuk said, “it was a blow.”

Tiptoeing Around Trump

The election of Mr. Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their C.I.A. partners on edge.

Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin and dismissed Russia’s role in election interference. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate his Democratic rival, Mr. Biden, resulting in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.

But whatever Mr. Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other direction. This is because Mr. Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as C.I.A. director and John Bolton as national security adviser. They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and the building of additional secret bases.

The base in the forest grew to include a new command center and barracks, and swelled from 80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russia from interfering in future U.S. elections was a top C.I.A. priority during this period, and Ukrainian and American intelligence officers joined forces to probe the computer systems of Russia’s intelligence agencies to identify operatives trying to manipulate voters.

In one joint operation, a HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.

General Budanov, whom Mr. Zelensky tapped to lead the HUR in 2020, said of the partnership: “It only strengthened. It grew systematically. The cooperation expanded to additional spheres and became more large-scale.”

The relationship was so successful that the C.I.A. wanted to replicate it with other European intelligence services that shared a focus in countering Russia.

The head of Russia House, the C.I.A. department overseeing operations against Russia, organized a secret meeting at The Hague. There, representatives from the C.I.A., Britain’s MI6, the HUR, the Dutch service (a critical intelligence ally) and other agencies agreed to start pooling together more of their intelligence on Russia.

The result was a secret coalition against Russia — and the Ukrainians were vital members of it.

March to War

In March 2021, the Russian military started massing troops along the border with Ukraine. As the months passed, and more troops encircled the country, the question was whether Mr. Putin was making a feint or preparing for war.

That November, and in the weeks that followed, the C.I.A. and MI6 delivered a unified message to their Ukrainian partners: Russia was preparing for a full-scale invasion to decapitate the government and install a puppet in Kyiv who would do the Kremlin’s bidding.

U.S. and British intelligence agencies had intercepts that Ukrainian intelligence agencies did not have access to, according to U.S. officials. The new intelligence listed the names of Ukrainian officials whom the Russians were planning to kill or capture, as well as the Ukrainians the Kremlin hoped to install in power.

President Zelensky and some of his top advisers appeared unconvinced, even after Mr. Burns, the C.I.A. director, rushed to Kyiv in January 2022 to brief them.

As the Russian invasion neared, C.I.A. and MI6 officers made final visits in Kyiv with their Ukrainian peers. One of the MI6 officers teared up in front of the Ukrainians, out of concern that the Russians would kill them.

At Mr. Burns’s urging, a small group of C.I.A. officers were exempted from the broader U.S. evacuation and were relocated to a hotel complex in western Ukraine. They didn’t want to desert their partners.

After Mr. Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the C.I.A. officers at the hotel were the only U.S. government presence on the ground. Every day at the hotel, they met with their Ukrainian contacts to pass information. The old handcuffs were off, and the Biden White House authorized spy agencies to provide intelligence support for lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil.

Often, the C.I.A. briefings contained shockingly specific details.

On March 3, 2022 — the eighth day of the war — the C.I.A. team gave a precise overview of Russian plans for the coming two weeks. The Russians would open a humanitarian corridor out of the besieged city of Mariupol that same day, and then open fire on the Ukrainians who used it.

The Russians planned to encircle the strategic port city of Odesa, according to the C.I.A., but a storm delayed the assault and the Russians never took the city. Then, on March 10, the Russians intended to bombard six Ukrainian cities, and had already entered coordinates into cruise missiles for those strikes.

The Russians also were trying to assassinate top Ukrainian officials, including Mr. Zelensky. In at least one case, the C.I.A. shared intelligence with Ukraine’s domestic agency that helped disrupt a plot against the president, according to a senior Ukrainian official.

When the Russian assault on Kyiv had stalled, the C.I.A. station chief rejoiced and told his Ukrainian counterparts that they were “punching the Russians in the face,” according to a Ukrainian officer who was in the room.

Within weeks, the C.I.A. had returned to Kyiv, and the agency sent in scores of new officers to help the Ukrainians. A senior U.S. official said of the C.I.A.’s sizable presence, “Are they pulling triggers? No. Are they helping with targeting? Absolutely.”

Some of the C.I.A. officers were deployed to Ukrainian bases. They reviewed lists of potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians were preparing to strike, comparing the information that the Ukrainians had with U.S. intelligence to ensure that it was accurate.

Before the invasion, the C.I.A. and MI6 had trained their Ukrainian counterparts on recruiting sources, and building clandestine and partisan networks. In the southern Kherson region, which was occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the war, those partisan networks sprang into action, according to General Kondratiuk, assassinating local collaborators and helping Ukrainian forces target Russian positions.

In July 2022, Ukrainian spies saw Russian convoys preparing to cross a strategic bridge across the Dnipro river and notified MI6. British and American intelligence officers then quickly verified the Ukrainian intelligence, using real-time satellite imagery. MI6 relayed the confirmation, and the Ukrainian military opened fire with rockets, destroying the convoys.

At the underground bunker, General Dvoretskiy said a German antiaircraft system now defends against Russian attacks. An air-filtration system guards against chemical weapons and a dedicated power system is available, if the power grid goes down.

The question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts — as Republicans in the House weigh whether to cut off billions of dollars in aid — is whether the C.I.A. will abandon them. “It happened in Afghanistan before and now it’s going to happen in Ukraine,” a senior Ukrainian officer said.

Referring to Mr. Burns’s visit to Kyiv last week, a C.I.A. official said, “We have demonstrated a clear commitment to Ukraine over many years and this visit was another strong signal that the U.S. commitment will continue.”

The C.I.A. and the HUR have built two other secret bases to intercept Russian communications, and combined with the 12 forward operating bases, which General Kondratiuk says are still operational, the HUR now collects and produces more intelligence than at any time in the war — much of which it shares with the C.I.A.

“You can’t get information like this anywhere — except here, and now,” General Dvoretskiy said.

Natalia Yermak and Christiaan Triebert contributed reporting.

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán .

Adam Entous is a Washington-based investigative correspondent and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Before joining the Washington bureau of The Times, he covered intelligence, national security and foreign policy for The New Yorker magazine, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. More about Adam Entous

Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations. More about Michael Schwirtz

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

The Ukraine war has been fought largely on the ground in the past two years. But as the Russian military presses on with attacks in the east, its air force has taken on a greater role .

As President Vladimir Putin of Russia threatened nuclear escalation if NATO troops entered the conflict in Ukraine, statements by President Emmanuel Macron of France  and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany  exposed how Western allies were struggling to maintain unity.

As the death toll from a Russian strike on an apartment building in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa rose to 12, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said delays by allies in supplying air defenses had contributed to the deaths .

Holding a Sliver of Hope: A Russian mother knows her son, a conscript, died 14 months ago in a battle in eastern Ukraine. But she is still waiting for him.

A Long Fight: On the second anniversary  of Russia’s invasion, many weary but determined Ukrainians  are taking a longer view of the war , pinpointing the Maidan uprising of 2014 as the start of a 10-year conflict with their adversary.

Sending a Message: Two years since the start of the war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin of Russia has fully embraced the image of an unpredictable strongman  ready to escalate his conflict with the West.

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

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  1. Critical Reading: What is Critical Reading, and why do I need to do it?

    Your task as an enlightened critical reader is to read what is on the page, giving the writer a fair chance to develop ideas and allowing yourself to reflect thoughtfully, objectively, on the text. 3. Consider the title. This may seem obvious, but the title may provide clues to the writer's attitude, goals, personal viewpoint, or approach.

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  3. Critical Reading Towards Critical Writing

    Critical reading may involve evaluation. Your reading of a text is already critical if it accounts for and makes a series of judgments about how a text is argued. However, some essays may also require you to assess the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. If the argument is strong, why? Could it be better or differently supported?

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    While the best way to develop your skills as a writer is to actually practice by writing, practicing critical reading skills is crucial to becoming a better writer. Careful and skilled readers develop a stronger understanding of topics, learn to better anticipate the needs of the audience, and pick up writing "maneuvers" and strategies from ...

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    Reading a text critically requires that you ask questions about the writer's authority and agenda. You may need to put yourself in the author's shoes and recognize that those shoes fit a certain way of thinking. Work to determine and understand an author's context, purpose, and intended audience. WORK TO UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN STRATEGIES AND ...

  7. In Between the Lines: A Guide to Reading Critically

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    Here are the ENGL-121 objectives that are relevant to the reading process: 4) Maintain a controlling purpose for research and writing that emerges from a clearly-defined research question. 5) Locate, evaluate, and integrate appropriate sources accurately and fairly through paraphrase and direct quotation.

  13. What Is Critical Reading? A Definition For Learning

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  14. Introduction

    In service of that process, you will learn about a few other things along the way: The reading process will help you read sophisticated texts in sophisticated ways. The writing process will help you produce sophisticated texts of your own through brainstorming, pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing.

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    How to Write a Critical Analysis Essay. Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Jun 7, 2021 • 3 min read. Critical analysis essays can be a daunting form of academic writing, but crafting a good critical analysis paper can be straightforward if you have the right approach. Critical analysis essays can be a daunting form of academic writing, but ...

  16. Introduction: Critical Thinking, Reading, & Writing

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  20. Why Students Should Practice Critical Reading

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  24. The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin

    There, representatives from the C.I.A., Britain's MI6, the HUR, the Dutch service (a critical intelligence ally) and other agencies agreed to start pooling together more of their intelligence on ...