Week One: Creative Reading, part 2

Because each essay we've selected contains several strands of argument, a creative reader must read each essay several times to identify and explore each argumentative thread. You'll need to read each essay a number of times and in a number of different ways as you prepare, write, and rewrite your assignments. As a creative reader, you won't stop reading when you've figured out the author's "point." Rather, you'll keep reading until you have created and developed multiple connections between the author's essay and your own evolving position.

Here is a recommended schedule for reading and rereading each essay.

Before you write your first draft:

• Read the essay through once, quickly, to get a general idea of the topic, how the essay is organized, and what the writer's main ideas on the topic are.
  

• Then, re-read the essay more slowly, with a pen or pencil in your hand, so that you can mark key ideas and examples, underline key terms, and write questions in the margins that you have about what you've read.

• Once you've identified the key ideas and passages that you will use in your first draft, you're in a position to begin planning your essay. (More about this in the following tutorial on exploratory writing.)

After initial class discussions of the assigned readings:

• During your class discussions of the assigned reading, pay attention to your classmates' comments. What ideas and passages are your peers focusing on and why? Which passages does everyone seem to be having trouble with or avoiding altogether?
  

• Return to the essay and reread it with these questions in mind, paying particular attention to those parts of the reading where your peers have made connections that you haven't seen or anticipated. Now that you've got a general sense of the author's argument in the assigned reading, focus on the details of the essay and see if you can explain how all the pieces of the argument in the assigned reading fit together.

Before you write your final draft:

• It is to be assumed that your ideas and positions will change as you write and revise your draft. This is part of the learning process, so when you start to feel your ideas shift, don't panic! It just a sign that you're beginning to think through your ideas and their implications. The point of revising your paper is not to hold your ground at all costs, but to use the process of revision to think further and more deeply about the position you've taken.
  

• With this in mind, before you begin drafting your revision, return one more time to the assigned reading and seek out not only other passages that may help support your new position, but also to see what you've missed on your previous readings. Look for passages that seem to contradict or complicate what you're arguing in your paper and revise your argument to take these passages into account. The strongest papers don't avoid these complications: they anticipate them and discuss ways that they may be resolved.

That's bound to seem like a lot of reading to produce a strong five-seven page paper and, well, it is!

We don't imagine, though, that you'll do each of these readings in the same way. That is, we don't picture you starting at the first word of the assigned reading and making your way through every subsequent word until you reach the end and then repeating the process over and over. That doesn't sound like a way of reading that fosters creativity: if you don't read with questions in mind, you're not really reading as we define it. You're just going through the motions.

The trick is to learn how to read in different ways to meet the many different demands that are placed on you as a writer. So, in the remainder of this tutorial, we will focus on the kind of reading we think you should do before you discuss the assigned reading in class and before you write your first draft.

next>> Creative Reading: How to do it