SQR4

Alyssa Vasquez

Ashley Favata

ENG 1301.28

Instructor: Trang Phan

9/20/10

SQR#4: Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning

Haas, Christina., and Linda Flower. “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of

Meaning.” College Compostition and Communication, Vol. 39, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 167-183

Summary:

The article Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning by Christina Haas and Linda Flower in my opinion shows how these strategies are ones built over time. No one wakes up and becomes a great reader much less writer. Actually dissecting a reading and relating the article to real world experiences, understanding the author’s purpose and his effect toward the reader are all aspects needed to fully create an understanding of the reading. “Rhetorical strategies take a step beyond the text itself… In rhetorical reading strategies readers use cues in text, and their own knowledge of discourse situations, to recreate or infer rhetorical situation of the text they are reading” (176). Students mainly just paraphrase, but experienced readers does that and more. A rhetorical view of reading is a great way to open up to the topic and see it and understand it in different perspective, using this strategy helps evaluate the reading by asking questions in order to construct meaning for the text. As students, unlike experienced readers, we are taught to rely on text-based strategies to construct meanings, so we don’t have same full sense of reading as the experienced readers. “To interpret any sophisticated text seems to require not only careful reading and prior knowledge, but the ability to read the text on several levels…”

Question: What does rhetorical reading do for students?

Response: “To interpet any sophisticated text seems to require not only careful reading and prior knowledge, but the ability to read the text on several levels, to build multi-faceted representations. A text is understood not only as content and information, but also as the result of someone’s intentions, as part of a larger discourse world, and as having real effects on real readers” (170). The problem here is that students are reading only for information. I agree with the article in that rhetorical reading seems to be a strategy above average students use and the average does not. I feel in my reading experiences I have only come to try and understand what the author is stating and only after completing the reading I am able to ask myself questions which go beyond the actual readings context. Although I have I have found English to be my better subject, I have never been an above average reader. In elementary our school’s method of teaching reading comprehension was a colored system of short stories organized by length and complexity. At the end of each reading were a series of questions to test the reader. These were the primary methods our school system used to test a readers understanding. I think that from this point students such as me are shaped and molded to only grasp an understanding, and as the article discusses choose “nodes” of information that are in a reading. This article never fully discuses what rhetorical reading analysis is, so the reader is left to decide for themselves what the actual definition is. So with these rhetorical strategies helps us build a better view of what we are reading to have a better understanding of what we are reading.