Reading Strategies and Reflections: Guiding Questions for Effective Reading

Guiding Questions

In the first unit, you chose the primary and some secondary texts you wished to study for your ISP. However, good reading depends on more than fluency; it requires us to ask questions of the author and sometimes ourselves as we read. If you are reading a novel by Stephen King, for example, you may react more negatively to one scene than another. Ask yourself why. Going beyond the plot, you have to think about the kind of character the author is creating. Does this character have a particular moral or philosophical stance? Do you agree with it or disagree with that character? Does the author occasionally give us “too much information?” Consider, for example the long descriptive writing of Victorian novelists like Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope, for example, who occasionally seem to stop telling the story entirely in order to describe a town or a particular landscape. Why are such novels still read today? Does such a style presuppose any attitudes on the part of the reader? To guide your reflections on the literature you have chosen and your own reading strategies, below you will find a series of questions to help you think about various aspects of the text. Please select 4 of these questions to respond to. Use subheadings to identify which four reading strategies you are addressing. Your assignment should be approximately two pages double-spaced. Questions: 1. Predicting or Generating Expectations: At various stages of your reading of the text… What sort of things could happen in the short and long term? 2. Puzzles: What puzzles or problems are you formulating at various reading moments? What specific questions are you asking of the text? 3. Filling the Gaps: What gaps are you filling in the text? What connections between events are you making? What is the point of each event? Why was a particular character included in the novel? 4. The Repertoire of Personal and Literary Experience: What connections are you making between events in your own experience and events in the novel? Does the book remind you of other books you have read? 5. Mental Images: What mental images are you forming of people, places and events in the novel? Consider the nature of these mental images and where they come from. For example, are they purely pictorial or are they more significantly “feelings about” things? 6. The Implied Author: What impression is the book giving you of the kind of person who wrote it? Do you find it difficult to sympathize with his or her view of the world? 7. The Implied Reader: What kind of reader do you think the author had in mind as his or her audience for this book? Are you having any difficulty suspending your own values, prejudices, and worldviews sufficiently to enable the book to work on you? Why? 8. Ideology: There is no such thing as an ideologically neutral text. What is the ideology of this text? What is the ideology of the society that saw fit to regard it as a great work of art? If the novel is not contemporary, why does it still speak to us today? 9. Reflection/Self-Understanding: From considering questions like 1-8, what are you learning about: a) Yourself as a person? b) Your own strengths and weaknesses as a reader? What are your really productive reading strategies? c) For example, when you come to “boring” bits, think about what boredom means to you, and what you are learning about yourself from being bored.