Modes of Reading#

Although you may have never heard it called by this name, extractive reading is probably the form of reading you are most familiar with. It is an act of decoding—reading in the service of understanding. We begin with extractive reading because it is the foundation upon which all of the other modes of reading depend.

When we perform extractive reading we ask: “What does this text actually say?” Emphasis falls on “actually” here because we are commonly far less accurate readers that we imagine. We skim and project; we allow our biases to shape or block what we see; we fail to look up important references or vocabulary; we grow impatient or distracted and outsource our work to others or technology. But extractive reading is a discipline that pushes back against these tendencies by training us to slow down and patiently consider the words and ideas on the page. This requires rigor and intellectual honesty, but also a capacity for restraint. As you read, you not are jumping to conclusions, not agreeing or disagreeing, not praising or criticizing; you are instead listening and observing, making sure that you have first understood the text before you do any of those other things.

In extractive reading we often find ourselves writing. As we move carefully through a text, we may endeavor to document the argumentative structure, note key terms, and flag evidence the author uses to support their conclusion(s). The main tools for this work are annotation, summary, selective quotation, and paraphrase.

Think of extractive reading as drafting a reliable schematic of the text. A schematic is not the machine itself. It invariably leaves things out. It simplifies. It focuses attention on certain key features. Extractive reading is dedicated to noticing how the text holds together, how the various components relate to each other, how the text works.

A useful tool for extractive reading is annotation.

If extractive reading asks “What does this text actually say?” then critical reading asks “What do I think about it and why?” In extractive reading, you defer to the text; in critical or close reading, you assert yourself against it, or work alongside it. You ask what you think yourself, based on what the text has brought before you, or you consider what can be done with the text now that you have it. Both cases requires courage, because they involve you publicly taking a position and then defending it. It also requires humility. The best critical readers first allow themselves to become vulnerable and empathetic to a text’s claims and ideas; they are committed to the patient work of understanding before they move to judgment.

In critical reading we examine the ideas and reasoning of a text on our own terms. The form of the analysis is rhetorical. We might ask: is this text persuasive or wise? Does the reasoning and evidence really support the author’s claims? Does the author make assumptions that, properly understood, threaten the logic of the piece? If we accept the conclusion of the text, what other things must we accept, and what would the consequence of those things be?

In close reading, your focus is on explication. It emerges from moments when you encounter some difficulty in the experience of interpreting the text. Your writing carefully lays out your interpretation for the audience; it is the attempt to attain some greater clarity on what the text actually means and then carefully “show the work” of how you achieved it. This form of writing is often associated with literary texts. Your writing might be an effort to interpret a text in some new way, as you might interpret a poem by making it mean something that others have not been able to see.

But the most important thing to keep in mind with critical and close reading is that they are not simply about liking or disliking, agreeing or disagreeing. They are about thinking—publicly, carefully, and accountably about what meaning(s) you find in the text.

A useful tool for critical / close reading is critical notes.

As you read, stay alert for anything that seems curious, unfamiliar, or unexpected—even when it sits at the margins of the text’s purpose. When something catches your attention (an unfamiliar concept, an offhand reference, a gesture to history or biography, a questionable statement of fact, an oblique inspiration, or anything you find curious or interesting) set the text aside and then do something about it.

Where it takes you is genuinely open. A departure might lead to the library, to track down some obscure reference. It might mean looking up an unfamiliar word and then trying to use it that week in a sentence. It might lead to another text, another author, another question. It might prompt you to do something. You might hear an author describe a place and feel compelled to visit it, or find it on a map, or look up photographs of it, or read about its history. You might read about how land is surveyed, or an engine is rebuilt, or how glass is blown and then find some way to try it. The point is that every departure doesn’t terminate in a book or a library database. It might send you out into the world.

This mode of reading asks you to adopt a completely different attitude and posture toward the text—a far more subjective, personal, and creative one. In these moments, you are not trying to get to the bottom of what the author means. You are instead allowing the text to do something to you: to set off a chain of association, curiosity, or wonder that carries you somewhere the author perhaps never intended. I also considered the French word détournement for this approach to reading because it suggests a “hijacking,” “misuse,” or “misappropriation” of the text. While the extractive reader dutifully asks “What does this text mean?”, in a departure reading the reader asks, “What does this text make possible?” or “Where can I take this?” If “close reading” names the disciplined, careful work of digging down and drawing nearer to what a text says, the departure text names the experience of taking flight off to someplace unfamiliar and far away. Both forms of reading a legitimate aims, but we rarely practice the second one in school, which means we rarely develop the capacities it cultivates—things like curiosity, lateral thinking, intellectual risk-taking, and the willingness to get productively lost. But this is key: the departure is not finished when a text has taken you somewhere; it is finished when you return with writing and thinking of your own.

Up until now, your teachers probably viewed this form of reading and writing as uncritical or lazy—something they were tasked with training (and rewarding) you to avoid. But this is emphatically not a careless or lazy way of reading at all. It requires a particular form of perception. Not the mentality of the student asking what will be on the test, but the idiosyncratic focus of someone who embraces curiosity and is open to surprise. In this frame of mind, the smallest and seemingly insignificant detail on a page can become the most important thing in the text.

Practicing departure reading prepares you to perform research. All research begins like this—not with a prescribed thesis or topic or assignment, but in a personal sense of wonder. Something strikes us as curious or cryptic, and rather than merely pass over it, as we often do, we pause and consider it. This momentary hesitation is the origin of all inquiry. It marks the shift from passive reception to active pursuit. To inquire means to go looking or hunting for something—to follow a trail out of the text and into the library, the archive, the field. My hope is that these small research assignments will help us learn to draw out these pauses rather than skip over them, leading us to develop a research habit or reflex in the process.

If you later think this bit of knowledge you discover will be helpful or interesting to others, read or describe your entry during our class discussion of the text. In many cases, your efforts will serve to deepen our collective understanding of the text, since it will provide additional context for our reading. However, it may also be the case that your inquiry travels far, far away from the text to pursue some idiosyncratic and personal interest others might not fully appreciate or even understand. But this is important: you should follow the freak wherever it takes you.

A useful tool for departure reading is field notes.

In craft reading, you read in order to learn about writing.

Writing is a craft—something we make. And because it is made, it can be studied, imitated, and learned. We can stand back from a finished piece and see how it was put together: the choices the writer made, and how those choices affected us as we read. This reading mode asks different questions than the ones we considered above: not “What does this text mean?” or “What do I think about it?” but “How does this text do what it does?” and “Could I perhaps do this myself?” In this mode you read as a maker: someone alert to technique, decisions, style. When you encounter something particularly fine, you no longer merely pause to admire it; you ask how it was done, and consider how you could perhaps do the same.

We might notice how the author chose to begin a piece: perhaps by picking a fight, or telling a story, or making a clear and unambiguous statement of intent. You might notice how an author pauses to concede a point without surrendering their argument, how they frame evidence, how they position themselves with respect to authorities, how they arrange a paragraph so that it builds to its main claim rather than stating it at the beginning. You might pause at a moment where you felt something deeply and investigate how the specific arrangement of words produced such a profound emotional effect. Or you might read the words aloud, listening for the rhythm and musicality of the text. Like a hacker reverse-engineering a piece of software, you work backward to understand how it was made.

Every text you encounter was made by a writer who was once in your exact situation: someone trying to understand what they think and then put those ideas into words. Just like you, they faced the problem of how to begin, how to argue, how to capture an audience, how to end. What can you learn from their choices? At the heart of this reading mode is this fundamental truth: every good writer is a thief.

Each of the reading modes described above is an event where you are alone with the text. However, meaning can also be made in community. Some of what a text holds is not visible until our reading is set beside someone else’s.

Social reading asks: “What did another person see that I could not?” As a practical matter, we accomplish social reading by annotating a text, noting the parts that we find important, meaningful, problematic—then exchanging our effort with someone else. In our partner’s work we don’t see something refined or polished, but something raw and honest: the trace of their thinking as they encountered the text. What did your partner underline? What symbols did they use to flag portions of the text and what do they mean? What questions did they ask in the margins? What connections did they make? As we study these marks and notations, we witness two things: where the reader’s attention landed, moment to moment, and the meaning they found and made as they read.

Find moments where your partner focused in on something you passed over. Why did they find this passage or phrase or reference significant? Ask them. Talk it through. Try to read these moments in the text again, through your partner’s eyes. The mismatch of these notations and annotations is not some problem to be resolved or a discrepancy to balance (there is no “right” or “authoritative” way to notice). Instead, it is a lesson to learn: the text you read is partially something that you construct yourself, something you make because of your unique mind and disparate life experience. Think of this form of reading as borrowing someone else’s eyes for a moment. It is impossible to crawl out of our own minds unaided; we require the help of someone else to gain a different point of view.

Significantly, this only works if our marks are honest ones. We don’t annotate for an audience—to impress, or to signal some virtue. We read for ourselves first, noting what genuinely catches us, and only then do we share it.