the importance of "critical reading"

                I think that “reading like a writer” was a very relevant article considering the research that the class is doing for the memory and research paper. For me, the article means that I should not read an article just to be reading it but I should read it with the intentions of getting something useful out of it that I can later use in writing. Sometimes, especially during assigned reading, I just skim through an article or piece of writing and try to gather the main points. What this article is trying to encourage is to first look at the situation that is causing the author to write, the authors purpose for writing, the claims the author is making and the audience the author is writing to. If we keep all of those things in mind while reading, I think there is a better chance to gather and actually comprehend the information to use later rather than reading and just trying to memorize it.

                During my research for the memory and research paper, I have used some of the techniques discussed in the article. For me, I found that because there were so many articles about my topic, it was hard to narrow them down and find the ones that would be the most helpful. After reading the assigned reading, I started looking at each article and tried to find the situation, purpose, claims and audience to better decide which ones to use in my paper. It personally was a useful technique and helped me pick and choose what information to use. Also, once I chose articles that I thought would be useful, I would try and “critically read” each article by printing it off, getting a pen and annotating them so that when writing my paper I could look back at the articles and know exactly what I wanted to use in my paper. Even though the idea of “critical reading” has been taught to me in other English classes in the past, this article was a great reminder of how useful and important it can be when reading and gathering information for a paper.