>> Hey everybody, this is Meghan Facciuto.
I work at Sacramento City Colleges Writing Center,
and I am going to walk you through a workshop on reading
for college and about how to break down a reading
so that you can better understand it
in order to write about it.
Although the Writing Center mostly deals with--
or we assist students with writing, a lot of the time
if you've been in a writing class,
you know that you often have to write
about things that you read.
So, we're going to talk about stuff
that you can do before you read to help give you an overview
of all the stuff that you're going
to encounter before you encounter it.
Some things that you could do,
strategies to use while you're reading to helpfully--
or to hopefully help you break apart what it is
that you're reading, and then things
that you can do afterwards that will help you commit
that reading to memory.
And if you look at these overall pictures, the picture of a guy
or a person, I don't know, going on a hike,
and in the middle it gets kind of hard.
He's like, jumping over a big gap and then--
and climbing further uphill.
I feel like this is kind of what reading can be like.
It's kind of a difficult and overwhelming process sometimes.
But if you can get to the-- get past some of that and down
onto the downhill, you know, it carries you forward
into reading for all your classes.
So we're going to talk again about things
to do before your reading, things to do during your reading
and then things to do after you read.
And we're going to start off with stuff
that you can do before you start your reading.
So on the same way this guy is getting an--
or looking out at what he is about to do on this hike.
You can also plan or map out a course
of action before you start to do a reading.
And this might seem simple, but choosing a good time
to read can be really, really important.
If you are not a morning person and you're trying to get
through your reading assignment in the morning,
it's just not working, that might be the reason why.
So pick a good time when you know you'll be alert
and focused.
In the same way, pick a place where it's easy to focus.
If you know that you're going to distracted at home,
maybe go to the library of if the silence of the library
or the third floor of the library is just too silent,
maybe you're distracted by that, maybe go to a place
where you're not so distracted.
And then also being able to break
down big reading assignments into smaller chunks.
So oftentimes, you'll get a big reading assignment
from a teacher, maybe a whole chapter or multiple chapters
to read by say, next week or something.
And that can seem a little overwhelming sometimes
because you're looking at the overall number of pages
that you have to read.
But if you think about it in terms of how much time you have
to read it and you break that assignment down over the number
of days that you have to do it, maybe you don't have
to read 40 pages, you just have to read five pages per day.
And then you've got these smaller chunks to read
and that can seem a little bit more doable.
It's a smaller goal to read than a larger goal all at once.
So these are just things that you can do to help plan.
And another way of planning with pre-reading, pre-meaning before,
is to get an overview of a reading
and create a context for it.
So when you're reading essays, articles, books, et cetera,
it's-- it can be really good
to ask yourself some important questions.
Things like, who is this author, who wrote this.
Are they an expert in the field of whatever you're reading?
Are they just some random person?
What is his or her message to readers?
What are they trying to tell us, as you're reading through it?
When was this text written?
Was it written 100 years ago?
If it was written on a topic like, say,
something like the educational system, somebody's perspective
of that is going to be really, really different,
maybe 50 years ago versus, you know, 20014.
So, you can attach the history
of whenever something was written to what the message is.
Where was the writing published?
Is this written by an American?
Is it written by a person from another country?
A lot of the time we can't really divorce the meaning
of a text from the culture of the person who wrote it, right?
That, sometimes, can play a part.
So where was it written?
Where was it published?
And then why did the author write the text?
What's the point?
What am I supposed to get out of it?
And questions like these can create a context
for the reading, a bigger picture
of what we're supposed to make of it.
And without a context it can be really, really difficult
to understand what a text is trying to convey.
So why is this important?
Let's ask some questions as readers about a text
that I'm going to show you with no context at all.
I'm going to show a little passage of writing and we don't
who wrote it, we don't know when it was written,
all of those things that we just went over.
And as a little disclaimer, this passage has a bit to do
with drugs and alcohol, so be aware of that,
and I'm going to read through it.
And again, we don't know any of the answers to those questions
and you can read along with me at home and then we'll talk
about what maybe we think it's about.
So, "I had learned not to care.
I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years.
Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow
when you could afford it.
Not smack, though-- Micky, my potential initiator,
had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that.
Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking
like a faulty engine when he said it.
Maybe he was just cold; we were standing in a meat freezer
in the back of the deli where he worked,
and it couldn't have been more than twenty degrees in there.
But he didn't look like he was shaking from the cold.
Looked more like he was sweating,
his face shiny and tight.
Junkie. Pothead.
That's where I'd been headed:
Except the highs hadn't been about that.
I got high for just the opposite effect,
something that could push questions of who I was
out of my mind, something that could flatten the landscape
of my heart, blur the edges of my memory."
So if we think back to those questions, like who wrote this,
do we know if this is a man or a woman,
a young person, an old person.
I mean, there's no exact proof but maybe we imagine somebody
in our mind as we're reading it,
but we don't really know who wrote it.
Do we know when it was written?
Well, it doesn't maybe sound like language
from over 100 years ago, right?
Like, we have these slang terms like pot
and booze and blow and smack.
Those are words that kind of, you know, represent the drugs
and alcohol that they're, I don't know, that people use.
What else?
We don't know why this person wrote it.
Sometimes, in person, students will say, "Well,
it looks like he is or she is looking back on their life
and maybe analyzing why they did drugs or a time in their life
when drugs were present."
But we can't really be sure because we don't know
where this came from, right?
So why don't we look at where this does come from.
So that passage comes from "Dreams
from My Father" by Barack Obama.
We can see up at the top that it was a number one New York
Times bestseller.
It's a story of race and inheritance.
And I'm wondering if this makes any difference in the way
that we read that passage if we go back to the passage.
Do we think anything else when we read it?
If we look at the back of the book, at the top-left corner,
you can see that this was a memoir that Barack Obama wrote.
And so what is a memoir?
It kind of looks like the word memory.
A memoir is a book that someone writes to tell the story
of their life, usually.
So I'm going to read what it says on the back here.
"In this lyrical, unsentimental and compelling memoir,
the son of a black African father and a white African--
and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning
to his life as a black American.
It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns
that his father, a figure he knows more as a myth
than as a man, has been killed in a car accident.
This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey--
first to a town in small-- a small town in Kansas,
where he retraces the migration of his mother's family
to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets his African side
of the family, confronts the bitter truth
of his father's life,
and at last reconciles his divided inheritance."
So this is him kind of telling the story of his past.
And so does that matter in terms of the information
that we're getting from it.
The passage, incidentally, is just a bit of information
from his college years.
Well, before he became president, obviously.
And if we look at when this was written,
this is the copyright page from that book.
And so if you look, the earliest copyright was 1995.
And so when did Barack Obama become president?
If you're saying 2008, you're right
and so this was well before he became president
over a decade before he became president.
So, does that matter?
Would he have written this exact same book
after he'd become president?
Maybe not.
Maybe he's being more candid and more straightforward
in his writing because he didn't have that status yet.
Maybe he would write the same thing, who knows?
But these kinds of things create a context for the reading
and they're-- they can help us understand the text,
if we know them before we start a reading.
That's the idea behind that.
So now we're going to look at things
that you can do during your reading process
that can help you make better sense of what you're reading.
Have you understand it a little bit better?
So you notice this guy here is holding
on for dear life onto a rope.
This might be the hardest part of this hike, right?
So we're going to talk about what's called active reading.
Active reading is definitely more work, but it's worthwhile
because it means that you're going
to understand what you've read versus be lost
at the end of a reading.
And if we look at the picture
of the guy he's active right now, he's doing something.
And so the difference between active
versus passive readers are things like,
active readers will have a purpose and a plan
for their reading before they start.
So they maybe have asked some
of those questions before they begin a reading.
Whereas, as passive readers might be just reading
to get it done, like I've got this assignment,
I got to get through it.
I don't really care if I don't get it, I'm just going to do it.
Active readers will ask questions
and make predictions while they're reading,
kind of like we just talk about.
Passive readers may read without thinking about definitions
of words or unfamiliar words.
Things that they don't understand, they might just kind
of pass over and keep rolling.
Active readers usually work
to monitor they comprehension regularly, meaning, you know,
if you read through a paragraph and you don't understand it,
you're asking yourself after each bit or chunk
of the reading, do I know what's going on right now?
Do I understand what this author is saying?
And if you don't, then kind of reread that passage and doing
that until you do know.
A passive reader might read
on without understanding the material.
Again, just reading to get it done.
Active readers use what are called context clues,
and maybe a dictionary to figure out the meanings of words.
And we're going to talk more about context clues in a bit.
Passive readers may skip over words or sentences
that don't make sense.
Active readers will annotate or take notes.
If you've ever taken a reading class,
you may have heard a reading teacher talk about annotation
or a writing teacher talking about annotation.
It's kind of just a fancy word for taking notes
about your reading either on the book
or the article or in a notebook.
But passive readers might read without writing anything,
without writing down anything about what they've read.
And we're going to talk more about annotation and look
at some examples of that as well.
And then active readers would summarize important concepts
as they're reading.
Whereas, passive readers probably don't think or talk
about a reading after they've finished it.
Once again, they're getting it done and they're moving on.
So everything that's in red is hard.
It's difficult.
It's frustrating, but if you can get through it, you might end
up on the better end of things.
So when words are confusing in a text,
when you're reading something and it just looks like this,
active readers often use context clues.
That's one of those things--
one of the bullets that I just mentioned.
Context clues are just information near a word
or a phrase that can help a reader determine its meaning.
So, if you see a word and you don't know what it means,
it doesn't necessarily mean that you always have to pick
up a dictionary, if you can use context clues.
So for instance, let's look at a few sentences.
This first sentence, "An edifice
like the White House can take a really long time to build."
Edifice, that word isn't thrown
around in common conversation I guess everyday.
Maybe it's kind of a more complicated word.
But what else in this--
in the sentence shows us what edifice might mean?
It's something that you have to build, and an example
of one is the White House.
So if you think that it might be a building, you're right.
An edifice, like the White House,
can take a really long time to build.
It's just building.
If you speak Spanish, "edificio" is building, right?
So maybe you could take the root of it and know it that way.
But the context clues in that sentence show us what
that word means.
Another one here, "Agoraphobia, that's a big word.
A fear of crowded spaces or enclosed public places is the--
is common among many Americans."
So the last one, the context clue is an example.
In this case, the definition is built in as a context clue,
a fear of crowded places or enclosed public places,
and that's common among many Americans.
Many Americans have agoraphobia.
So sometimes we can find the definition
in the actual sentence.
You don't have to pick up a dictionary and look
for the meaning of that word.
And then if we look at the last one, "She's outgoing sometimes,
but she can be pretty introspective too."
Sometimes the context clue can be built into the word itself.
So the root of that "spect", if you say a spectator,
a football game, that somebody who's watching the game, right?
Or he had to use his spectacles
to read the newspaper, his glasses.
The root of that is to look.
And "intro", meaning into is to look into or be a person
who looks into themselves.
And if you look at the structure of the sentence,
she's outgoing sometimes, friendly, talks to people
but she can be pretty introspective too,
so maybe she's kind of pulled
into herself often looking inward.
So, all of these are examples of sentences that you might be able
to figure out the meaning of a word with context clues.
Active readers also pay attention
to signal words and phrases.
These are things, word clues that hint
at the author's meaning in a text
or indicate a shift in thinking.
So when you see these things you might know
that you should be zeroing in on something for particular reason.
So let's look at some examples.
Here's some signal words that show how important something is.
So things like the primary reason or most or especially,
definitely, certainly.
These words show that the writer of the text
that you're reading is going to point
out something that's really important,
and that maybe you should pay attention too,
if you want to figure out the overall meaning of the text.
There are other signal words that show things
like transitions or shift in ideas.
So maybe you're going to see things like another, also,
in addition, furthermore, moreover.
These words or signal phrases indicate some point
where the author is going to give more information
about the same idea that they've just mentioned.
So maybe they're going to give another example of something
that they're discussing.
You see things like due to the fact that
or due to, since, because.
You can pretty much assume
that the author might showing the cause of something,
"Because I-- because my alarm didn't go off,
I woke up late and missed my class."
That's the cause of the problem, right?
So when you see words like that, you might know that you're going
to be presented with a cause of something.
Things like as a result or consequently are going
to show the opposite, the effect.
So "As a result of the--
as a result of World War II there were a lot
of social problems in Europe."
You're indicating the effect.
And then similarly, likewise, it's going to show a comparison.
Whereas, on the other hand or however are going
to show contrast, opposites.
So paying attention to words like this
in a reading can help you comprehend what the author is
saying, if it's complex material.
So when words are confusing in a text,
active readers also use something we mentioned before,
reference text.
These are just books, parts of a book, website,
et cetera that can give more information
about the meaning of a word.
So these might be things like a print dictionary,
like if you have one in your backpack, a glossary,
the back of a book where you have definitions.
And online dictionaries, sometimes you can have
on your phone or that kind of thing.
An index if you're just looking for quick, you know,
quick words in a textbook or that kind of thing.
And then Wikipedia, I see sometimes
because oftentimes you'll hear a teacher say
that Wikipedia is a something you shouldn't use and it is kind
of a problem because Wikipedia is--
it's Wiki, it's a place where anyone can go
and add information to it,
so it might not be very valuable information.
But if you're looking at the page and you see
that there references put in after what's being mentioned
at the bottom of the page, like if people have put information
in there but they've shown the source where it comes from
and you can go to that source,
sometimes Wikipedia could be a good place
to just get basic information about the meaning of a term
or a concept, so use it critically, with a critical eye.
And then sometimes when ideas are confusing in a text,
not so much individual words but the ideas
of what you're reading, full sentences,
active readers will annotate.
So again, annotate means to take notes on a reading
or in a notebook for the purpose
of remembering important material.
This includes highlighting, too.
So sometimes you might see students highlighting
in their book or an article.
And on of the biggest questions I get is, you know,
how am I supposed to annotate,
I don't really know how to do this.
And my answer often is that every one annotates differently.
But the purpose again, is to remember the information
that you're reading, and so whatever helps you do that,
whatever helps you zero in on the most important,
the main of something or some details that you want
to remember that support that main idea, you can mark them.
And so let's take a look at a few examples
of student annotations to see like, what other people do.
So here's a little passage
and I'll read what's originally there.
"It may even be more brutal these, with an excessive testing
and the watchfulness not only of parents and teachers
but the big eyeball of the system itself,
its vision intensified by video surveillance cameras, Facebook
and the omnipresent Web, which tracks everyone down,
puts every idiotic statement in the virtual concrete
of electrons forever."
So what is this student doing?
There's a lot of circling going on, right, and some underlining?
If we look in the margin it looks
like this person circled things
and then translated it for themselves.
Maybe earlier in the ext it was referring to high school,
so they circled that and they reminded themselves
that it is high school.
Brutal, maybe they used the dictionary.
They looked up and it said cruel.
Same thing with excess, means too much.
The big eyeball of the system itself.
Maybe based on the rest of the reading,
that means society as a whole.
Surveillance, ways of observing, so observation.
Omnipresent means present everywhere.
Virtual is kind of online.
And then concrete, they were taking to mean tangible reality
or real world reality.
And if you read that with those words put in instead of what's
on the page, high school may be even more cruel these days
with too much testing and the watchfulness not of parents
and teachers but society itself.
Society's vision intensified by observation, Facebook
and the Web, which is everywhere.
These kinds of things replacing the complex words
with your own words might help when you go back to a reading
and you have to revisit it and make sense of it again.
If you have to-- If you have nothing on this page
and you have to go look at those words again,
that can waste some time and it can be really frustrating.
So if you keep a record of it, then you can kind of scan
through a little bit faster.
And the process of doing this annotation,
a lot of people say commits it to your memory,
writing these things
in the margin using the reference text in combination.
So this is one example of how somebody annotated in order
to understand what the words in the text meant.
Here's another example.
So this looks pretty different, right?
How does this-- How is this one different?
We see maybe fewer circled things,
there's one circled thing.
There's some underlining.
This one's got some highlighting that the other one doesn't have.
And then there's this phrases in a margin.
And so if we read that, "There is, in fact,
no teaching without learning.
Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching,
and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning."
So that's kind of a mouthful.
It sounds kind of complex.
What does it say in the margin, the student wrote?
There is no teaching without learning,
teachers learn and learners teach.
So maybe this person was putting this stuff into their own words
as a way of remembering something really important
from the chapter.
And when you do that you are summarizing for one
or you're paraphrasing something.
And even though it takes time to do that, if you end up having
to write something about this text,
you already have some writing done, right?
Like, you have your notes about the writing and it's exactly
where those notes are referring to on the text.
That can be a reason that writing in a book
or on a page can be helpful.
And again, annotation is done by students, obviously,
but it's also done by smart professionals.
So if you look at this, if any of you have seen this movie
"The Shining", it's probably one
of the scariest movies ever made, I think.
"The Shining" is a film, it's a movie but it used to be,
before it was a movie, it was also a book by Stephen King.
It was a horror book.
And in order to make the movie, Stanley Kubrick had
to read the book, "The Shining" and he,
in fact, annotated that book.
So this is a picture of Stanley Kubrick's annotation
of the book "The Shining".
And his annotation looks a little different, right?
Like, he's got two colors of highlighting.
And if you read in the margins where that blue is, it says,
"Is this the date we want?"
On the other-- the left-hand side it says, "What period?
'10s, '20s, '30s."
Maybe he was trying to decide, we don't know,
because these are notes to himself but maybe he was trying
to decide if he wanted to set the movie
in the same time period as the book was said.
We don't know, but this is his way
of remembering what he's thinking
at that time and he's reading it.
And he can flip through that book
and then make his decisions later.
So this is something really smart people do,
and college classes are great place to practice it.
So we're going to talk a little bit also about things
that you can do after your reading so that you can, again,
hopefully, commit that reading to memory as best as you can.
So reviewing, looking at something again,
committing the reading to memory.
A lot of people will restate ideas from a reading either
in their head or out loud or-- and writing.
If you can restate what you've read it often means
that you're able to summarize it,
that you're able to paraphrase it.
Some people will create a study group to discuss comprehension
or their opinions about something.
If you've taken English Writing 51 or if you're
in English Writing 51 and you're often assigned a full text,
a full book to read.
And if you have somebody in the class that you can talk
with about what you think about it or about stuff
that weren't quite sure what it meant, it likely means
that you're going to understand it better.
And then other people will write an outline
or a summary of the reading.
Sometimes you have to do this as an assignment,
but sometimes you can do it just
so that you understand it as best as possible.
And so what is an outline?
An outline is just a general description or overview
of a piece of writing with only the most essential
parts mentioned.
So you're kind of cutting to it quick and you're pulling
out the most important parts of reading.
So here are some examples.
For maybe a short reading assignment,
like if you're reading an essay or an article,
an outline might look something like this.
Like, maybe you start out with the author's main idea
or their argument.
And then maybe you list a few supporting details
that help the author explain that argument or make
that main idea come together.
And if the author concludes-- has a conclusion,
maybe you could write that down.
Like, what it is that they conclude about the topic
that they're arguing about, or if they some kind
of recommendation for readers.
Or if they have some sort of call to action,
meaning they want people to do something, act a certain way
as a result to reading it.
If you're putting these things down it might seem simple
but it's also forcing you to go back
through the text and make sense of it.
So, that might be for a short reading assignment.
If you have a longer reading assignment like,
maybe a whole book, maybe you have something
that looks like this.
Like, maybe where you're taking each chapter
and you're breaking it down, what the main idea
of the chapter is and a few important details
from that chapter that you want to remember.
You could also throw in the overall point of the book
and the overall conclusion of the book, if you wanted to.
Again, this is-- there are many ways to outline.
This is just an example.
And then what is a summary because this is something else
that you can do in order to help yourself understand what a
reading is saying.
A summary is usually a paragraph written in your own words
about the main idea of a piece of writing.
So it's going to be a lot shorter than the original text.
And a summary of a reading generally does not include the
reader's personal opinion.
So a summary truly is just saying what someone else says
in a reading.
And a lot of the time, I'll read a summary
that a student has written or if a teacher has asked a student
to summarize something, and it will sound something like,
such and such author explains that blah, blah, blah.
I think this is true because my experience shows me
that da, da, da, da, da.
A summary really is not that--
has nothing to do with personal opinion.
It's just the skill of trying to put
into words what an author says.
So let's look at some examples.
A summary of an article or an essay might look something
like this little paragraph.
In her article, and then give the title of the article,
Author X so and so, argues that, and then give the main idea
of the text, of that article or essay.
She claims that, and then maybe give an important supporting
detail and asserts another supporting detail.
You could add a couple of sentences if you want about--
about the most important points throughout the article.
And then finish up again with, you know, the author concludes
that blah, blah, blah.
Or overall, so and so recommends that blah, blah, blah.
So it's kind of like an outline except
that it's put into full text.
It's put into a paragraph.
So that one example.
And then if you were to look at a book summary, in his book,
give the title of the book, Author X explores the topic
of blah, blah, blah arguing that,
and then give the main idea.
In the same way as the last one, you're identifying the source,
so the book or the article, the author's name and the main idea
and then you're breaking it down.
According to so and so, give a supporting detail.
Furthermore, the author believes,
give another supporting detail.
And then you'll probably end up some kind of conclusion again.
Ultimately, so and so concludes that, and then tell you reader
that author's conclusion.
So again, there are many ways to do this,
this isn't the exact formula for any one summary
but they're examples that maybe you can use,
if you're a little bit lost as to how write a summary.
And then these are just some final tips for success.
OK. So number one, be confident that you can do it.
If you've never really been a successful reader in the past
or if you've had people tell you that you're not a good reader
or you feel that way, it'll probably surface
in your ability to do it.
So just believing that you can do it is one first step that's
actually kind of important.
If you're able to understand anything, you're able to build
on that, so be confident that you can do it.
Remember that reading takes time,
but it becomes easier the more that you do it.
And this is kind of the case with everything.
People who are really,
really successful academics didn't just, you know,
end up that way all at once, like it took a lot of time.
It's kind of like watching the Olympics, you know,
a really great athlete, you're just watching the final product
but what happens before that is all of the practice that needs
to lead up to that success.
Try to read something every day, something.
It doesn't have to be really complex material,
it could just be like this picture,
the Rolling Stone, right?
In the Writing Center we have copies of--
well, we have free magazines that we give away to people
and not just magazines like National Geographic,
there's like, you know, cooking magazines
and parenting magazines and People magazine,
just gossip magazines.
If you're reading something every day,
you start to internalize the patterns of language
and then you-- it's-- over time you start producing those
patterns in your own writing.
So, the more you read the better you write.
And then also ask questions, be curious.
If you're not asking questions, this is going
to be really, really boring.
The process of being a student will be boring, so be curios
about what it is that you're reading.
And also, just remember that you can visit the learning skills
and tutoring center or the Writing Center
to talk about your work.
If you don't anybody in your class well enough
to make a study group, come to the Writing Center.
We're sitting around waiting for you to come in so
that we can talk about your class work with you.
It's free.
It's open to everybody and we really hope to see you soon,
so that's the end of this workshop
and hopefully we'll see you in person.