Overview

You have heard time and time again two sayings pertaining to reading critically: "You can't tell a book by its cover," and "Don't believe everything you read." The first one is a way of saying don't be fooled by appearances, and the second one implies that just because something is in print doesn't automatically mean the information is valid and reliable. If these phrases kept you on your toes as a navigator and consumer of print text, they will serve you even better as you explore the world of digital text or what is often referred to as electronic or E-text. Indeed, because much of the print text you find in newspapers, magazine articles, or books got there as a result of a sometimes lengthy "filtering" process of reviewing, editing, and revising, you could, for the most part, believe that at least somebody besides the author evaluated the piece for validity, reliability, and writing quality.

As you begin reading and using digital text for research, you will have an even greater responsibility as a reader to evaluate critically what you find there before and as you consider using the information in your own quest for knowledge. Because World Wide Web texts can be so much easier to access than print ones in the library, uncritical readers could be seduced into using whatever they find. Also, since hypermedia documents, combine text, colorful graphics, and even sometimes audio and video, the appearance-the presentation-could easily lead uncritical readers into believing the content too is valid and reliable.

This project is designed to help you use writing as a way of filtering, understanding, and evaluating electronic texts. The activities will lead you through processes of writing what we call a "critical annotation" to help you understand, evaluate, and critique what you read. A critical annotation is a hybrid between an annotation (traditionally a 50- to 250-word abstract or summary of an article or book) and a critique (usually a text of several pages with the goal of not merely summarizing the text under analysis but also evaluating and judging it). Both kinds of writing are used often in school, but we've created this special category because both lack necessary features to be effective and efficient critical reading tools. The brevity of an annotation rarely requires evaluation; the critique is often so long and in-depth that you couldn't get through enough resources to get actually to writing a research paper. The project will also suggest ways you can use your computer-mediated learning community as the sort of filtering agent that you can often take for granted in the world of print text.

First, of course, you will need to conduct on-line research to find texts you may want to use in a paper you may be writing in this or other courses. You will find techniques for gathering digital information and texts in Chapter 4. Also, in many ways this project serves as a prerequisite for the kinds of writing projects you might undertake in Project 7, "Arguing Controversial Issues about the Information Superhighway" in Chapter 10, and Chapter 11, "Writing in the Disciplines." Because in those chapters you will be doing the kinds of context-rich academic writing that require research, you will need not only to understand what you read but to evaluate it as well.

Your class will also need to determine how you will use the critical annotations as a way of thinking about how many you may need to write. For example, if your group is completing this project as an exercise to learn to read more critically, doing one or two critical annotations might suffice. If, however, you are completing this project as part of your research process for one of the projects in Chapters 10 or 11, you will have to seek out and evaluate a number of sources-perhaps anywhere from five to ten or more, depending on what you find and how much evidence and support you will need to write your researched documents. If you are going to be doing a researched document, we suggest you write a minimum of five critical annotations. Yes, doing so will be time consuming, but learning to read critically is a crucial skill. The more you practice critical reading using the processes we recommend here, the better you will become at it. You can expect that the first several critical annotations will be difficult to do well, but as you follow the procedures more and more, you will begin to incorporate the processes into your reading habits. You will find that after a while asking the kinds of questions offered here will become an automatic and transparent part of your research and reading process. When that happens, the critical annotation process will become easier.