ACTIVITY 9.14
Reading for Comprehension

Step 1: Initial Pass-Through

Read through the steps and criteria in Activities 9.15-9.17. Keeping these in mind will help focus your reading.

Read through the document once as you normally would. Don't worry about taking notes now.

Jot down your first impressions about the text. Did you enjoy reading it? Was it easy or difficult to read? What sticks out in your mind as the most important idea?

Step 2: A Focused Reading

Read the following items as a way of focusing your examination of the text, and then read the text a second time with the goal of addressing these points in writing:

What kind of E-text is this? An E-mail message? A Usenet posting? A Gopher document? A World Wide Web page?

In your own words, what do you understand to be the main idea of the text?

Can you find a controlling idea or thesis? You might want to write that down. If you do, make sure you put it in quotation marks in your notes and write down the page number, URL, and so forth. This information will be crucial if you decide to use this text in an essay.

What kind of text is this? Is it a factual report in which the writer merely explains something? Is it an argument in which the author takes a position on an issue? Is it a narrative in which the author is telling a story about a person or event?

What can you infer about the intended audience? Is the language formal or informal in tone? Is the bulk of the vocabulary specialized and familiar only to other experts in the field or geared more to a general audience of nonexperts? Is the content general or in-depth?