Activities for Chapter 3

Activity 3A

This activity invites you to analyze your reading habits. List all the reading you have done in the last week. Include both “school” and “out-of school” reading. Try to list as many texts as you can think of, no matter how short and unimportant they might seem. Now, answer the following questions.

• What was your purpose in reading each of those texts? Did you read for information, to pass a test, for enjoyment, to decide on a product you wanted to buy, and so on? Or, did you read to figure out some complex problem that keeps you awake at night?
• You have probably come up with a list of different purposes. How did each of those purposes influence your reading strategies? Did you take notes or try to memorize what you read? How long did it take you to read different texts? Did you begin at the beginning and read till you reached the end, or did you browse some texts? Consider the time of day you were reading. Consider even whether some texts tired you out or whether you thought they were “boring.” Why?
• What did you do with the results of your reading? Did you use them for some practical purpose, such as buying a new product or finding directions, or did you use them for a less practical purpose, such as understanding some topic better or learning something about yourself and others?

Activity 3B

Part A: As directed by your instructor, in your writer’s notebook take notes on a photograph using a double-entry chart like the example in the chapter. After completing the chart, draft a brief story for the photograph, weaving description and dialogue into your narration of the scene in the photograph to show and tell the point (focus) you want to convey to readers (see Chapter 1 for narrative stragies). Feel free to be creative and interpret recklessly—your story may be fiction (made up) based on the example.

Part B: Complete the same steps in Part A only this time choose a photograph that you found or took for research purposes; this means your story must be factual. Which interpretations and analyses are reasonable and which are leaps that require further research?

Activity 3C

Choose a text—ideally a periodical—that you need to read for a writing project you are working on for a class. Or find a text as directed by your instructor, maybe one in a discourse community and genre related to your academic major or future profession. Read the text, annotate it, and take double-entry notes using the example chart provided in the chapter. Draw on your notes to compose a summary and then a response to the text. In class, exchange summaries and responses. As a reader, can you understand the content and context of the text based on your classmate’s summary? Is the summary free from evaluation and judgment—are the summary and response separate?

(Activity 3A was adapted from Methods of Discovery – Online Writing Guide.)