For Matt

Critical reading, is it necessary?

Absolutely. Life in America and the world does not present itself to you in aural mode only. Much of the stimulation that we, our brains actually, receive each day is auditory from word of mouth; the music of a wind symphony caused by, string, percussion or other instrument, the various noises of our environment, pleasant and unpleasant. Additionally we have the visual input from television, movies, the visible world around us, the script of a book, a magazine, a newspaper provide much more of the input to our thinking process.

A picture may be worth a thousand words.... A visual image may give you a quick sense of a situation or issue.... But frequently to understand the world, the living universe that surrounds us all, we must be able to read, analyze and understand the written word. The written word holds the secrets that allow us insight into the universe in which we live. To find those secrets and to understand the oftentimes hidden meaning of the secrets, critical reading is the answer.

How do you go about developing your critical reading skills?

• Do you read? Hopefully, you are able to answer in the affirmative to this question. Reading, especially in college is a prerequisite to doing well in whatever your chosen path of study.
• What do you read? Here again, it is important to read for pleasure whether books, magazines, newspapers or on-line content. It is also important that you read to become informed. In today's fast-paced electronic media, content is usually boiled down to simple and short sound-bites. Sound bites are today what newspaper headlines were in times past. Sound bites should tweak your interest in finding the facts behind the headlines. This requires the critical reading that we mentioned above. Critical reading leads to critical thinking and a much better informed you or me.
• Do you own your own dictionary? Do you use it when you come across a word that you do not know the meaning? Do you have an online dictionary on your homepage? The dictionary.com website that I linked in the previous sentence is an excellent source. It provides a dictionary and a Thesaurus with related words and the context of use within sentences. It also provides a set of Flash Cards with word definitions for words most often used on the SAT tests ...well worth exploring.

  If you normally skip over words because you do not know the meaning of the word(s), in the future, you should have a pad to write down the word and look it up on your laptop dictionary. Better still is to have the laptop open with the dictionary page available to search words real-time. This may slow your reading, but it will add to the comprehension of the words you read. Reading is probably the critical skill to master while in the pre-college years. Critical reading is even more important as you transcend into your college studies.

As an exercise for the remainder of summer, my suggestion is that you read various newspaper articles in your local papers, on-line at the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Mother Jones Blog and some of the blog links that I show down the right side of this blog. I especially would read: Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, Think Progress, Jared Bernstein, Irving Wladawsky-Berger among the ones that I show. Some have complicated subject matter. Some are tough for anyone to fathom, but the key for your needs is to understand a complex sentence, a paragraph and the vocabulary used within the overall postings or written articles.

As an additional suggestion, read the articles of my blog. Mine is more simple-minded than many of the postings in the links that I have suggested. Comment on what I have written. Challenge the conclusions that I have stated. Critically read my blog and the postings of others. Analyze with a skeptical eye and mind. Be thorough and freethinking in your analysis, let me know by your comments what you think, what you have concluded from your reading of my postings and from what you know from other sources.

Engage in critical thinking. Analyze the content and formulate your own opinions / conclusions on the subject matter. Find your own thinking on the meaning and write your comments in the comment space provided on each of my blog articles. I will respond to your comments. Maybe others will as well. We can enjoy a continuing dialog and maybe each of us will learn from the other.

Keep thinking, that is the critical process. I was very impressed by your comments in our discussion the other day at Smash Burger. Obvious to me is that you have already done some critical analysis about what you want for your future. Let's keep the thinking going and try to expand to other areas, other subjects, other possibilities. The key is to keep an open mind, think about what you know, seek additional information and rethink previous conclusions. The environment changes every day, every hour, every minute. It is important that you keep pace and change as new information presents itself.

In our commentary, if you wish you can refer to me as GP; I'll refer to you as Big "D" with the other guy being Baby "D". Other than your first name used above, we shouldn't use other personal data ...after all, you never know who might be reading our postings.