Critical reading

Critical reading


OTHER ASPECTS OF CRITICAL READING
In chapter 2 through chapter 8, you have successively dealt with seven major types of aspects of critical reading. However, your considerations of these seven aspects (together with their points) are not yet sufficient to help you be an efective critical reader. You need to consider some other aspects of critical reading, i.e the author’s competence, intention, attitude and bias, the time of publication of the reading material, the target readers and culture, and the policies of the publication. The accuracy of your consideration on these aspects largely depends on the scope of your background knowledge and experience. The richer your knowledge, the more intelligent your evaluation on these aspects will be.
A. The author’s Competence
There are many factors that affect what an author communicates through his writing. These fact-ors cover scope of background knowledge and experience, education, habits, and skills. Their combination forms the author’s competence which makes some athors more competent than others do in certain fields. For instance, compared to a professor working in the laboratories, a professor who works at a teacher preparation college can rationally write papers that are more valid on any subjects in education. To give another example, a writer who has had children can probably write more practical guide to child rearing than one who has never had children.

B. The author’s Intention
An author’s intentions in writing a passage may be various. However, there is usually a particular purpose that an author wants to achieve by writing a particular material at a particular time. The particular purpose must be one of the general purposes of the use of language, i.e. to maintain rapport, to inform, to convince, to persuade (and to move to action), and to communicate experience in esthetic form.
1. To maintain rapport.
In it’s simplest form, maintaining rapport is exemplified by the conversation which takes place upon chance encounters with strangers and casual acquaintances when conversation demands that we speak in order to avoid seeming rude. Thus, languange is used primarily not for the communication of ideas, but for the establishment of appropriate social relationships. On such occasions, we are careful to introduce subjects immediately establishing a common meeting ground, such as remarks about the weather, inquiries about a person’s health, and inconsequential comments upon “petty” topics.
In written communication, this is in parallel with reading materials written mainly for entertainment, like “post Scripts” in the Saturday Evening Post, and Lembergar” in Pos Kota. Such written matters use humor, anecdotes, exaggerations, the strange, the incongruous-anything that the writer thinks will genuinely please his reader.

2. To inform
To inform something to somebody else is the most common activity that people carry out using language. To inform means to explain and to share. To successfully achieve this type of purpose, professinal writers often present their facts in a way thatpiques curiosity. Take, for example, the succes achieved by the book entitled Conquest of the north and South poles.

3. To convince
A writer who seeks to convince is desirous only of securing agreement, the appeal is to the understanding. Any attempt to convince uses facts. However, different from a writer who presents facts only for the sake of explaining something, a writer who intends to convince always starts by cautiously discovering ideas he knows are non-controversial. Then he examines the opposing viewpoints fairly and dispassionately, adimts the strength and shows the weaknesses, relies heavily on facts and evidence, takes care to present a complete and logical picture, and if possible, uses testimony fro competent and acceptable authorities for reinforcement.

4. To persuade
To persuade or to move to action is the most difficult purpose to achieve, because in persuasion, the final appeal is to the volition and most human beings are reluctant to change. It is difficult because everyone has reasons, often deeply hidden and unknown, for clinging to familiar ways, and because action may mean giving up opinions lived with a long time, overcoming fears, and altering habits. Thus, a writer who wants to get his writers to act usually tries to achieve the first three purposes as preliminaries to this forth.

5. To present Experience in Aesthetic Form
This purpose is the goal a literary artist want to achieve through the creation of his works. He wants to reveal a segment of experience in the most perfect form he can devise. Although at times he may inform, convince, or persuade, that is not his real purpose. M oved by the significance of some aspect of life, he seeks to share his insights concerning human values and human conduct.

C. The Author’s Attitude
An author’s treatment of a subject reflects an attitude toward it. Attitude is also important to understand, because it shows the author’s personal feeling about the subject he is writing. Attitude can range from sad to happy, angry to delighted, sympathetic to unsympathetic, tolerant to furios. An author also has an attitude toward the reader. Some writers assume they are writing to people inferior o themselves while others write to their equals. How many textbooks have you read where the author seamed to be writing to other aspects in the field rather than to you, a new comer to the field?

D. The Author’s Bias
To be blased means to be prejudiced about or to have a special leaning towards something. For instance, you may be biased about the type of music you listen to. May be you have no patience with clussical music and prefer hard rock. That is a bias. Perhaps you are biased when it comes to food and you would rather eat vegetables than meat. Everyone is biased about something, whether it is food, music, religion, politics, or people.
Recognizing bias is very important in reading. If you are not capable of doing it, you may become the victim of an author’s propaganda. You may miss seeing how an author takes facts and misrepresents them. You may miss seeing that an author is being more subjectives (using personal opinion) than objective (using undistorted facts). Or your may miss seeing how one-sided some writing is.
Sometimes reconising an author’s bias is easy; at other times, it isn’t. Bias is apt to be present in advertisements, newspaper, and magazine editorials, and religions and political pamphlets. You generaly pay little atention toan author bias when it matches your own bias.
When you don’t agree with an author, the reverse is true. To read critically, you must always be aware of both your own and the author’s bias. This is, of course, means real involvement in and thinking through what is being read, In effect, critical reading is thinking.

GUNS AND BATTER
(Richard Lipez)

The hue and cry over the so-called American gun problem is being raised again, but what the “liberal” advocates of gun control continue to overlook are the legitimate uses to which guns are put by millions of law-abiding Americans. Guns don’t kill people, people do. The gun critics conventionally choose to forget that the vast majority of gun-owners in this country use their weapons only for peaceful purposes.
Despite the popular misconceptions, most Americans’ rifles, for example, are used as tomato stacks. Or as curtain rods, or softball bats. Sometimes as rudders (extra oars) on small rafts. Many rifle owners also stuff bundles of straw up the barrels of their rifles and-presto-they’ve got a child’s toy broom. (Gun owners know that the sooner childrenstart “pretending” to help keep the house clean, the sooner they’ll get into the habit of helping to do the real thing).

E. The Time of Publication of the Reading Material
The validity of ideas depends greatly on time. An idea that was valid some years ago may no longer hold true at the pesent days. Perceive the following example. For nearly 2000 years, it was believed that the sun and other planets revolved around the earth. However, in 1530 Copernicus in his Commentarioulus showed that the earth and other planets move around the sun. And in his 1609 publication entittled Aetological Astronomy, keppler further refined the ideas of copernicus, in which he showed that he planets do move around the sun, but in an ellipse. Thus, anytime you read a material, especially the one you need to take as a reference, don’t forget to check its time of publication. Many points in a book published more than twenty years ago might not valid any more to refer to.

F. The policies of Publication
The Policies of the publication often determine the type of the published material. You would not expect to find liberal publications in country strictly dominated by certain doctrical power, such as religious and military dictatorship. Those who hold power will try to prevent the publication of ideas considered potential to undermine the political integrity ans stability. Thus, in nearly all places, censorship is continuosly practice. The government of all nations imposes censorship of one sort or another. Different degrees of censorship have at different places been applied to all forms of communication. Extreme cencorship may take the form of an absolute ban imposed on a particular medium of expression or banishment, or even execution of the commentator.
However, to a certain extent, censorship has both positive and negative dimensions. In some cases, due to its obligation to protect public morals, a state may need to censor what it considers to be corrupting in order to keep the continuity of the existence of its society. On the other hand, the censorship need not be absolute. It may be restricted to only those sectors of the public which are susceptible to the evils that are supposed to arise from the particular form of communication.
Realizing the existence of censorship, then, as a critical reader you should always be alert that the policies of publication of the materials you are facing might have influenced their validity.


G. The Target Readers
One of the most important questions a writer has address to himself while he is writing is :” To whom am I writing?” The type of the targeted readers affects the materials being written. An article on the nature of language learning to be consumed by a college student will be written differently from the one written for a layman. That is why a literary work that has been “adapted” or simplified for primary school pupils must have lost some of its beauty, compared to the original version. Thus, in order to criticize fairly, you should take “to whom the material is written” an aspect of your consideration.