College Writing

College Writing Study Guide • Survey – When we discussed paragraph structure, we described how topic and summary sen- tences gave readers a good understanding of the paragraph’s content. When you’re reading texts, you can look at the topic and summary sentences – the �irst and last sentences of the paragraphs – to determine the general scope of the text. • Question – Now that you have a fair understanding of the text’s content, what are some ques- tions that you would like the text to answer? What are some initial challenges to the author’s argument that occur to you? Write down these questions before you read the text in its en- tirety. • Read – As you read the text, �lip to a different sheet of paper and write down the salient points. Your notes do not have to be in complete sentences, but they should be clear enough for you to understand. • Recall – Quiz yourself about the text’s content without consulting your notes. • Review – Look at your notes and compare them with the initial questions you had about the text. Are all of the questions answered? Are there still some challenges to the author’s argu- ment that the text did not meet? How much of the text were you able to recall without looking at your notes? A second method for critical or deep reading is the SOAPSTONE method. SOAPSTONE is more rhetorically focused than SQ3R, but because it questions the context of the text, during the test, you may not be able to answer all of the questions it asks. • Speaker – This question asks you to evaluate the author’s ethos. Is the speaker credible? What do you already know about the speaker, and is that relevant? For example, in the prompt pro- vided to you in the Achieve lectures, one of the texts quotes Drew Brees. If you are not a foot- ball fan, then your ability to analyze this speaker will be limited, and even if you are a football fan, you shouldn’t let your biases about the New Orleans Saints – either positive or negative – color your evaluation of his comments. • Occasion – This question asks you to consider the context behind the text. No text exists in a vacuum, so there is always an event that compelled an author to write. Understanding that event is one step to understanding the text’s meaning and overall effect. • Audience – In professional writing, you may not always be in the audience, so understanding the audience is necessary to bridging any gap between you and the speaker. While some ar- guments may be effective for you, those without your personal history might struggle to con- nect to them. On the exam, understanding the speaker’s audience may help you better connect to his/her argument. • Purpose – What is the author’s thesis? This is a profoundly important question for any textual analysis because it gets to the center of the text’s meaning.

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