Responding to Reading
Dawn Atkinson
Chapter Overview
This chapter discusses reading approaches—survey reading, close reading, and critical reading—and how these support the reading comprehension, retention, and application that are so critical to university-level study. Furthermore, the chapter encourages you to employ these approaches when reading a text about writing in order to craft a response to the text.
Effective Reading is Crucial to University-Level Study
Most college courses require students to complete a considerable amount of reading: texts of various lengths and levels of complexity that are composed for different audiences and purposes. Although this reality of college life surprises some students, various reading approaches exist that can help you manage the reading load. In particular, survey, close, and critical reading techniques can help you understand texts and retain their information.
As textbook writer Horkoff (2015, p. 8) notes, college-level reading tasks also require students to develop an understanding of viewpoints and evidence presented in texts, as well as biases, assumptions, and perspectives underlying discussion. The aim is to analyze, interpret, and evaluate texts, and then draw logical inferences and conclusions. This process oftentimes asks a reader to think about how ideas in texts are related and how they are relevant. Survey, close, and critical reading techniques consequently stress reading as a thinking process. The following subsections, which are adapted from Horkoff (pp. 8-14), explore these reading techniques in further detail.
Survey Reading
Survey a text to gain insight into its author’s credentials, to determine its publication details, and to grasp its overall gist so you can make decisions about the credibility and pertinence of information presented. Look at the following elements when performing this initial review: author information (if provided), publication information, title, abstract (if provided), introduction, topic sentences, conclusion, headings, subheadings, and visuals. The following are benefits of survey reading.
- It can help you connect the author’s qualifications with the text.
- It can help you identify the target audience(s) for the text.
- It can help you decide if the text is relevant for your purposes.
- It can give you a sense of the text’s thesis or unifying focus and how this is developed.
- It can increase your concentration when reading because you have a mental road map of how the text is constructed.
- It can help you budget study time because you know the text’s length and difficulty level.
Survey reading can be used with any document that allows for an overview: magazine articles, journal articles, and book chapters, for instance.
Close Reading
Read a text closely to concentrate on its specific content. To do so, examine the text’s overall structure; read and annotate the text, noting its thesis/unifying focus, main points, and essential details; and summarize the text’s important ideas and their development. Close reading is critical to academic work for the following reasons.
- You can clearly identify main concepts, key details, and their relationships with one another and are able to formulate a synopsis of what you read.
- You can identify a text’s purpose as you read through it carefully.
- You can demonstrate active engagement with a text as you work to comprehend its meaning for yourself, as opposed to simply memorizing information from the reading.
- You can become more confident with academic reading assignments as your understanding of different types of texts grows.
Close reading can be used in any circumstance that requires comprehension of a text and retention of its main points and supporting details.
Critical Reading
Read a text critically to identify its key points; to discern how they relate to your own thoughts, class discussions, and other materials you have read; and to assess the soundness of perspectives communicated and the support for those ideas. Critical reading necessarily requires deep involvement with a text and calls for a careful eye and an open mind in order to identify viewpoints, reasons, and evidence expressed. Critical reading, in turn, offers these benefits.
- By working actively to interpret, analyze, and evaluate the soundness of arguments conveyed in a text, you can thoroughly understand the text’s meaning.
- By examining a text carefully and thinking about its wider associations, you can pinpoint connections between it and your coursework, helping you to see how areas of study are related.
- By interacting with a text in a purposeful way, you can increase your attention level when reading.
- By developing a thorough understanding of a text and its construction, you will likely feel more confident when discussing it in class or in a writing assignment.
- By considering the soundness of the evidentiary support used in a text, you can become better able to assess the quality of source material.
Although critical reading can be useful in situations that specifically call for critique—analysis (close examination) and evaluation (reasoned judgement)—in reality, college-level reading, on the whole, calls for critical engagement with texts. Try out the following methods to encourage the development of critical reading skills.
- Connect what you read to what you already know. Look for ways the reading supports, extends, or challenges concepts you have learned elsewhere.
- Associate the reading with your own life. Determine how statements, characters, or situations connect to your personal experiences.
- Visualize what the text describes. This technique can help you understand how steps connect to a larger process, for instance.
- Pay attention to graphics as well as text. Photographs, drawings, diagrams, tables, charts, and infographics can help make abstract ideas more concrete, understandable, and relatable.
- Understand the text in context. Understanding context means thinking about who wrote the text, when and where it was written, the author’s purpose for writing it, its target audience, and what assumptions or agendas influenced the author’s ideas.
- Plan for opportunities to talk and write about what you read. Take notes on the reading and formulate questions to raise in class, bearing in mind that class discussions can stimulate and clarify ideas for assignments.
As this paragraph indicates, critical reading calls for a considerable level of involvement with a text, but it also brings valuable gains in academia and beyond.
Applying Reading to Writing
Although the techniques discussed thus far can contribute to reading comprehension and retention, they can also be useful in situations that call for the application of reading to written texts. A summary/response paper is one of these situations.
Engagement with a Text is Vital to Writing an Effective Summary/Response Paper
In a summary/response paper, a writer relays the key points of a text or multiple texts in summary form before responding to those points. A summary can actually help springboard a response since a writer needs to thoroughly understand and carefully consider the ideas of a text when summarizing it. A summary also establishes necessary context for a response and cites and references the original text(s). Bear in mind that as a writer, you cannot assume all readers will be familiar with the text(s) you respond to, so you must lay the groundwork for the response in the summary. List the full title of a text at or near the beginning of its summary, again to establish context for the reader. Notice how the following example summary, which is adapted from Babin et al. (2017, p. 122), supplies understandable context for the reader.
In “Beyond the Five Senses,” Matthew Hutson’s July 2017 article published in The Atlantic, the author explores ways potential technologies might expand human sensory perception. Hutson notes that existing technologies, such as cochlear implants, are already assisting people who do not have full access to one of the five senses. In much of the article, though, the science writer focuses on how emerging technologies might heighten the ways people sense things. Some of these technologies are based on senses that can be found in nature, such as echolocation (locating objects through reflected sounds), while others seem more deeply rooted in science fiction, such as antennas attached to the skull that can turn colors to sound for individuals with color blindness. Throughout his discussion of examples, the author encourages readers to consider how adding new senses to the ones they already experience might change how they perceive the world.
Reference
Hutson, M. (2017). Beyond the five senses. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/beyond-the-five-senses/528699/
This summary provides a succinct overview of the article’s central message while establishing necessary context for the reader.
Composing the Summary
A summary is a recapitulation of a text’s central ideas, expressed in a writer’s own words and sentences. A summary should thus exclude details—meaning that it will be shorter than the original text—and avoid a running commentary of points covered in the text (the author said this first and this second) by concentrating only on main themes. In addition, a summary should exclude a writer’s viewpoints. Save them for the response section of the paper. Lastly, if a summary includes word-for-word material from a source text, that material must be enclosed in quotation marks; nevertheless, reserve quotations for particularly expressive language since a summary restates main points in a writer’s own words. Survey and close reading techniques can be particularly useful when crafting a summary since a writer must thoroughly understand a text in order to summarize it. The “Reading Actively” chapter of this textbook provides detailed steps for producing a summary.
Composing the Response
A response expresses a reaction to a text—generally to what it says, how it is written, or how it influences your own thinking—and demonstrates involvement with the text. In this situation, critical reading can be particularly useful since the technique calls for analysis and evaluation of a text using a careful and detailed approach. Hence, you will engage in analysis and evaluation when asked to do any of the following in a response: comment on the strengths and weaknesses of a text; the quality of evidence used to support ideas in a text; the link between ideas expressed in multiple texts; or the association between the text and your own experiences, practices, or thoughts. The following response paragraph, adapted from Crane (2019, pp. 3, 6), illustrates the latter focus.
Professor Michael I. Jordan’s 2019 Harvard Data Science Review article entitled “Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet” encouraged me to consider how AI might be applied to humanities scholarship, particularly to the study of the past. Whenever—or even whether—the artificial intelligence revolution takes place, one topic that Jordan discusses will remain fundamental to humanities researchers: intelligent infrastructure (II). Jordan defines II as “a web of computation, data, and physical entities that makes human environments more supportive, interesting, and safe” (p. 5). Within this category, I would include the extensive digital libraries with which researchers can explore questions about human history and culture. In its ideal form, this type of library would incorporate the full record of humanity: not just traditional texts, but every video, song, podcast, film, advertisement, television program, oral history recording, mathematical calculation, musical composition, writing system, and linguistic expression. Such a resource would be invaluable to humanities researchers seeking to explore humankind’s cumulative trace upon its own past and present.
Reference
Jordan, M.I. (2019). Artificial intelligence—The revolution hasn’t happened yet. Harvard Data Science Review, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.f06c6e61
Sometimes instructors supply prompts to guide summary/response papers, but other times the direction of the paper is left largely up to you. Regardless of what a summary/response paper calls upon you to do, it is a persuasive document, meaning that you must support your viewpoints (also called claims) about the text(s) by supplying convincing reasons for those views along with sound evidence, which you may present in the form of facts, quotations, summaries, paraphrases, or visuals. Be sure to distinguish your views from ideas presented in the text(s) so the reader is clear about the origination of information.
Acknowledging Source Information
To acknowledge the source of information in a summary/response paper, begin by citing and referencing a text when summarizing it and refer back to the author and text as necessary in the response to mark the boundaries between the text’s words and ideas and your own. A signal phrase, which typically identifies an author’s credentials and uses a reporting verb or phrase to communicate what a writer says or does, offers one way to work the citation information into your paper in a cohesive manner. Here are two examples of signal phrases, the first used with a quotation and the second with a paraphrase.
- “The best prescription is prevention,” emphasized Bloom (2020), an infection prevention specialist at the Society for Better Health (p. 14).
[quotation + reporting verb + author name + publication date + credentials + page]
- According to Bloom (2020, p. 14), an infection prevention specialist at the Society for Better Health, social distancing was essential to combating the virus.
[reporting phrase + author name + publication date & page + credentials + paraphrase]
Full signal phrases like these can be used when first mentioning authors and their texts; afterwards, you can use an abbreviated signal phrase, such as Bloom also clarified, when discussing the same text. Also keep in mind that you do not need to repeat a full in-text citation if readers understand the source of the information presented. When discussing information from another section of the same source, simply provide new page numbers in parentheses following a reference to the source author. For example,
Jones (2020, p. 16) finds that enhanced metacognitive awareness is associated with writing expertise. Indeed, the researcher (p. 30) claims that such explicit metacognitive functioning characterizes expertise throughout many different domains of operation.
If you are summarizing the main idea of an entire text—in other words, an idea that does not come from any specific page of the text—you will not be able to provide a page number for the summary. These comments notwithstanding, you must re-supply an in-text citation whenever you move from discussing one source to another in a paper.
Various types of signal phrases can be used to embed source material within paragraphs, as textbook authors Lanning and Lloyd (2018, pp. 159-160) explain, and these can be distinguished by their attributive tags, which provide author credentials or other identifying information about source texts. The examples in Table 1, which are adapted from Lanning and Lloyd (pp. 160-161), provide further details about various types of signal phrases. The attributive tags are underlined in the examples.
Table 1. A variety of signal phrases
| Type: Lists an author’s credentials
Example: Santos (2019), Curator of Human Health and Evolutionary Medicine at the Finest Natural History Museum, explained… Purpose: Presents an author’s credentials to help build credibility for source material. |
| Type: Mentions an author’s lack of credentials
Example: Wang (2018), whose background is in marriage counseling, not foreign policy, claimed… Purpose: Points out an author’s lack of credentials to communicate that he or she lacks authority on a topic and to dissuade readers from adopting the author’s ideas. This type of signal phrase can be useful when discussing responses to counter-viewpoints. |
| Type: Identifies an author’s social or political stance, if this is applicable
Example: Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, Hayes (2019), a prominent civil rights activist, advised… Example: Spencer, who has ties to the White Nationalist movement, has denied… Purpose: Explains the author’s social or political stance to help readers understand why he/she expresses a particular view. This understanding can positively or negatively influence readers, so sustain an objective tone in the signal phrase by avoiding emotive language. |
| Type: Mentions the publisher of a source text
Example: According to a recent National Public Radio poll… Purpose: Identifies the publisher and capitalizes on its reputation/credibility to emphasize the trustworthiness of information presented. |
| Type: Lists the title of a source
Example: In “Understanding Human Behavior,” Bukhari (2020) argued… Purpose: Provides readers with source details to help contextualize discussion of the source. |
| Type: Explains the circumstances of a source
Example: In a talk given during a free speech rally, Shulman (2018) encouraged… Purpose: Reveals details about source origination to give readers a sense of the source’s aim. |
While reading through the example signal phrases listed, you may have noticed that they employ a variety of reporting verbs. Table 2 lists additional reporting verbs along with their associative meanings.
Table 2. Various reporting verbs and their connotations
| Neutral Reporting Verbs | Tentative Reporting Verbs | Strong Reporting Verbs |
|---|---|---|
| said | implied | warned |
| pointed out | speculated | denied |
| described | estimated | asserted |
| reported | proposed | argued |
| noted | suggested | contended |
| observed | intimated | maintained |
| mentioned | inferred | insisted |
| offered | presumed | refuted |
| added | hypothesized | denied |
| defined | guessed | confirmed |
| discussed | imagined | emphasized |
| wrote | posited | recommended |
Integrate different reporting verbs into your writing to develop sentence variety and maintain reader interest, but select them carefully to convey intended meaning: when discussing viewpoints, choose a reporting verb that matches the strength of the claim made in the original source text or expresses how you feel about that claim.
Structuring the Paper
As with other formal documents, use an introduction, body, conclusion, and reference list construction when writing a summary/response paper. Depending on length restrictions, assignment specifications, or your own personal preference, you might decide to use one of the organizational structures in Table 3 for the paper.
Table 3. Ways to organize a summary/response paper
| Introduction
1. Establish context for the reader by introducing and summarizing the text(s) you will respond to. 2. State your thesis by indicating the topic and position or intention of the paper. 3. Forecast the content of the paper and its organization. Body: respond to the text(s) by focusing on one main idea per body paragraph 1. Start with a topic sentence that introduces readers to the main idea of the paragraph and controls the paragraph’s development. 2. Follow with supporting sentences that develop the main idea of the paragraph by supplying information, examples, illustrations, and source details. Conclusion 1. Unify the paper by summarizing your response. 2. Emphasize the paper’s central message, but do not introduce new information into the conclusion. References 1. Place the reference list at the end of the paper, on its own separate sheet. 2. List the full bibliographical details for sources cited in the paper. |
| Introduction
1. Establish context for the reader by introducing the text(s) you will respond to. 2. State your thesis by indicating the topic and position or intention of the paper. 3. Forecast the content of the paper and its organization. Body: focus on one main point or section of a text per body paragraph 1. Summarize the point or section you intend to respond to. 2. Respond to the point or section by discussing your agreement or disagreement with it, by addressing how it is written, or by explaining how it influences your own thinking. Conclusion 1. Unify the paper by summarizing your response. 2. Emphasize the paper’s central message, but do not introduce new information into the conclusion. References 1. Place the reference list at the end of the paper, on its own separate sheet. 2. List the full bibliographical details for sources cited in the paper. |
Both of these organizational structures provide vital context for the reader in the form of a summary before transitioning into a response, as this chapter recommends.
Activity A: Read and Work with Texts about Punctuation
Read the following handouts.
- “Apostrophes” (Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo, n.d.a) at https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/sites/ca.writing-and-communication-centre/files/uploads/files/apostrophes_0.pdf
- “Commas” (The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020a) at https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/commas/
- “Quotations” (The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020b) at https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/quotations/
- “Semicolons, Colons, and Dashes” (The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020c) at https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/semi-colons-colons-and-dashes/
Now review the feedback on your previous writing assignments. Identify three punctuation issues that recur in your assignments and handout sections that will help you address these issues.
Issue one + handout section:
Issue two + handout section:
Issue three + handout section:
Activity B: Read and Engage with another Text about Punctuation
In “Punctuation’s Rhetorical Effects” (https://writingspaces.org/sites/default/files/cassell-punctuation-rhetorical-effects_0.pdf), Cassell (2020) explores strategies for understanding the way punctuation functions in texts. To help you comprehend, retain, and apply the ideas discussed in the essay, practice survey, close, and critical reading techniques by following the steps provided. Actively engage with the text by making notes on the steps as you proceed.
- Use these prompts to survey the text.
- Read the title of the essay.
- What does the word rhetorical mean? If you are not sure, look up the answer by typing rhetorical definition into Google.
- What do you think rhetorical means in terms of the essay?
- Read the “Overview” section of the essay.
- Read the first paragraph after the “Overview.”
- Read the section headings.
- Read the “Final Words” paragraph.
- Based on your reading, what are your initial thoughts about the essay’s topic?
- What do you know about the text’s author? Google his name plus institutional affiliation (listed in the first paragraph after the essay “Overview”) to learn about his qualifications.
- How does your knowledge of the author’s credentials affect your impression of the text?
- Read the publication information that precedes the essay.
- What did you find out about the publication in which the essay appears?
- Who is the text written for?
- Read the title of the essay.
- Use these prompts to perform a close reading of the text.
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- Read the essay in its entirety. Annotate as you go by underlining or noting down unfamiliar terms, questions, and thoughts regarding the reading. For further advice on making annotations, see “Annotating Texts” (The Learning Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020) at https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/annotating-texts/.
- After reading, try to define the unknown terms you identified.
- After reading, try to answer your questions. You may need to review the essential details of the text again to do this.
- Determine the essay’s purpose.
- Identify the essay’s thesis or unifying focus
- To do so, think about how essays are constructed. Generally, a writer will articulate the thesis or unifying focus in the introduction (the essay section that follows the “Overview”).
- McCann at al. (2017, p. 73) also suggest searching for the most important thing said about the essay’s topic, for a statement that all of the information in the essay supports, for an important lesson communicated in the essay, or for a sentence that reflects and unites the essay’s central meaning.
- Identify the main idea of the essay section entitled “Strategy 1: Learning Explicitly.” Again, think about how essays are constructed: a writer generally articulates the main idea of a paragraph in a topic sentence.
- Identify the main idea of the essay section entitled “Strategy 2: Visual Reading.”
- Identify the main idea of the essay section entitled “Strategy 3. Aural Reading.”
- Identify the main idea of the essay section entitled “Final Words.”
- Summarize the text using your notes.
- Concentrate on the essay’s thesis/unifying focus and main ideas or themes when summarizing, and omit details.
- Put the essay away when summarizing it to avoid copying its language and sentence structures.
- Read the essay in its entirety. Annotate as you go by underlining or noting down unfamiliar terms, questions, and thoughts regarding the reading. For further advice on making annotations, see “Annotating Texts” (The Learning Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020) at https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/annotating-texts/.
- Use these prompts to perform a critical reading of the text.
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- Identify how the author contextualizes the essay for readers by looking for associations between the essay and other texts, learning/teaching strategies, authors, schools of thought, or historical figures or time periods.
- Identify links between the essay and course concepts, priorities, outcomes, discussions, or lessons.
- Identify links between the essay and world-of-work applications.
- Identify connections between the essay, your assignment feedback, and the punctuation handouts you read previously.
- Consider your own reactions to the reading.
- Answer question one on essay page 13.
- How do you feel about the strategies discussed in the essay?
- Do you think that one particular strategy would work better for you? If so, why?
- How did the essay affect your understanding of punctuation
- How did the essay change your perspective regarding punctuation?
- Will you use any of the strategies discussed in the essay? Why or why not?
- Identify the evidence used to support the essay’s main ideas. Evidence may be presented in the form of facts, quotations, paraphrases, summaries, and visuals.
- Is each of the author’s viewpoints (claims) supported with evidence?
- Does the evidence sufficiently support the claim?
- Is the evidence relevant to the claim?
- Is the evidence logically tied to the claim?
- Is the evidence research-based (empirical), factual, or grounded in hearsay or casual observation (anecdotal), or does the author rely heavily on a reader’s emotional reactions to communicate the force of his viewpoints?
- Can you easily associate citations with their references and sources? Note that the essay uses MLA (Modern Language Association) referencing style.
- Identify the connection of reasons to viewpoints. The essay author may state reasons outright—look for uses of seeing as, because, since, given that, and the like—or imply them.
- Consider the design of the essay relative to its genre.
- What impression does the design give you?
- How does the design contribute (or not) to your understanding of the essay?
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Homework: Compose a Summary/Response Essay
Draw upon the work you completed for Activity B to write an essay that summarizes and responds to “Punctuation’s Rhetorical Effects” (Cassell, 2020). Unless your instructor supplies a more specific prompt, respond to what the text says by expressing whether you agree with it, disagree with it, or both; by concentrating on how it is written; or by addressing how it influences your thinking. When composing your essay, you may discuss points from the reading and hands-on task you completed for Activity A, but remember to cite and reference all outside sources of information. Follow the guidelines presented in this chapter when writing your paper; in addition, consult the “Writing Essays” chapter of this textbook for essay formatting guidance.
Use the following, produced by the Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo (n.d.b), when revising your essay to ensure it is clear, concise, cohesive, and correct.
Revision
Revision is the process of revisiting your work to make sure it says what you want it to say. You need to be flexible and prepared to make major structural and organizational changes. It takes time and is a circular process, which means going back over your work several times throughout the writing process.
Helpful tip: What is the difference between revision and proofreading?
Proofreading is the final stage in revising and editing your writing, whereas revision looks at more global aspects of your writing such as the argument, flow, logic, evidence, and organization of your work. Only when you are satisfied with these larger aspects of your writing is it time to proofread.
Note that the Writing Centre will not proofread your paper and make changes for you. We will help you determine your personal problem areas and teach you to proofread your own work.
General strategies
- Get some distance
Take a break. Go for a walk. Give yourself at least a few hours between finishing a draft and picking it back up again for revision. - Print out a hard copy
Print out your work and revise from a hard copy. - Read your work out loud
Your ears are better at finding problems than your eyes are, especially when you have been working on a piece of writing for a while. - Revise and proofread in stages
Don’t try to review all your work at once. If you do, you’ll likely become frustrated and miss what you want to change. - Review large elements first
Pay attention to large, overall concerns like content and structure. Work on smaller items like grammar and punctuation last. - Keep re-reading
Keep re-reading your work to make sure your entire paper makes sense as you make changes. - Get feedback
Give your work to others for feedback. Seeing how your work is understood by a reader can help you improve your writing in new ways.
Specific strategies
Content
When reviewing your content, make sure your information is presented clearly, at the right time, with sufficient depth, detail, and relevance for the purpose of your work. Check that there is no extra or irrelevant information. It’s hard to let go of ideas and thoughts, but if they don’t fit, they must be cut.
Questions to ask:
- Is my purpose clear?
- Is my main idea/thesis stated early?
- Do I have sufficient evidence or data to support my ideas?
- Is all my material relevant to my purpose?
- Have I addressed my readers’ potential questions?
Structure
The shape and flow of your paper or assignment is very important. Your reader should be able to follow the logic and path of your argument, easily and without feeling surprised, confused, or lost.
Questions to ask:
- Are my ideas presented logically?
- Do I introduce new information by connecting it to what I’ve already said?
- Do I connect back to my thesis or purpose to show how pieces fit into the overall paper?
- Is my information easy to follow? Does the writing flow?
- Have I repeated any ideas in more than one place?
- Are any parts too long or too short?
- Does my organization follow the structure required for the assignment?
Helpful tip: To see whether your paper presents information in a logical order, make a reverse outline:
- Summarize each paragraph in a single sentence.
- Arrange these summaries according to the order of your paragraphs.
- Evaluate the outline. Do you notice any gaps in information or places where the content should be rearranged?
Paragraphs
Each paragraph or section should be a well-organized, self-contained unit that focuses on a main idea and/or serves one purpose. Check to see whether each paragraph is cohesive by ensuring that all of your information flows and is connected, like a chain, from beginning to end.
Questions to ask:
- Does the paragraph focus on a single idea?
- Does the idea clearly relate to my thesis or purpose?
- Do I begin with a topic sentence to summarize the paragraph?
- Do I provide evidence and other details to support any argument/claims I make?
- Do I provide sufficient explanation and analysis to connect the paragraph’s main idea, the evidence, and my thesis?
- Do I finish the paragraph with a summary?
Clarity
Sentences can be different lengths, but each sentence should focus on one point or idea as clearly and concisely as possible.
Questions to ask:
- Are any sentences too long with too many ideas?
- Do any sentences have more words than needed?
- Can I replace vague words with more precise language?
- Do I use the right word (not the biggest word) for what I want to say?
- Can I state an idea more simply?
Helpful tip: Read your sentences out loud. If you find yourself losing interest, or having to reread to make sense, it’s time to rewrite.
References
Babin, M., Burnell, C., Pesznecker, S., Rosevear, N., & Wood, J. (2017). The word on college reading and writing. Open Oregon Educational Resources. License: CC BY NC 4.0. https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/wrd/
Cassell, K. (2020). Punctuation’s rhetorical effects. In D. Driscoll, M. Stewart, & M. Vetter (Eds.), Writing spaces: Readings on writing (Vol. 3, pp. 3-17). Parlor Press. License: CC BY NC ND 4.0. https://writingspaces.org/sites/default/files/cassell-punctuation-rhetorical-effects_0.pdf
Crane, G. (2019). Response to “Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet.” Harvard Data Science Review, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.e32f6dec
Horkoff, T. (2015). Writing for success 1st Canadian edition. BCcampus Open Education. License: CC BY NC SA 4.0. https://opentextbc.ca/writingforsuccess/
Lanning, J., & Lloyd, A. (2018). Signal phrases and attributive tags. In M. Gagich, E. Zickel, A. Lloyd, C. Morgan, J. Lanning, R. Mustafa, S.M. Lacy, W. Breeze, & Y. Bruce, In practice: A guide to rhetoric, genre, and success in first-year writing (pp. 159-163). MSL Academic Endeavors. License: CC BY NC SA 4.0. https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/
The Learning Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (2020). Annotating texts. License: CC-BY-SA 4.0. https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/annotating-texts/
McCann, T., McCann, J., & Kinonen, A. (2017). Writing summaries and responses. In A. Kinonen, J. McCann, T. McCann, & E. Mead (Eds.), ENGL 101 rhetoric and composition (2nd ed., pp. 72-77). Bay College. License: CC BY 4.0. http://library.baycollege.edu/ld.php?content_id=23584170
Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo. (n.d.a). Apostrophes. License: CC-BY-SA 4.0. https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/sites/ca.writing-and-communication-centre/files/uploads/files/apostrophes_0.pdf
Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo. (n.d.b). Revision. License: CC-BY-SA 4.0. https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/sites/ca.writing-and-communication-centre/files/uploads/files/revision.pdf
The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (2020a). Commas. License: CC-BY-SA 4.0. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/commas/
The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (2020b). Quotations.License: CC-BY-SA 4.0. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/quotations/
The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (2020c). Semicolons, colons, and dashes.License: CC-BY-SA 4.0. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/semi-colons-colons-and-dashes/
