Learning Outcome 3: Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Framing Statement:

Actively and critically reading though a learning outcome for English 110 is a task that could be used for all subjects. Prior to this course, I had little to no practice with annotating and critically thinking while engaging in text. Throughout this course, I had developed many forms of integration of self to text through critically and actively reading. When engaging in a text I try to in a way read the essay in an opposing stand. In doing this     I am able to pull apart the authors claims and strongest points by the fact that if the evidence and claim brought up was enough to convince me to go with their claims. Susan Gilroy provides a great example of this in her essay “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits To Develop in Your First Year at Harvard” with the claim of “analyzing adds an evaluative component to the summarizing process… what is the writer asserting? What am I being asked to believe or accept? Facts? Opinons? Some mixture? What reasons or evidence does the author supply to convince me?”. I felt great connection to this as many of these questions come into mind while analyzing text, things such as trying to find ways to argue points, to agreeing upon new ideas brought up. A lot of my tendencies while annotating rely heavily on underling the moments I felt were key in the authors claims. I feel it it provides a new approach to learn about the text. In a sense if the claims and importance all tie back to the thesis as a reader and underlining the critical points could in a sense outline the essay itself. I also like to rephrase a claim or include my input on it, I feel it in a sense creates a dialogue between myself and the author. Going through a text if you are able to read it and be able to ask why, or have feedback it creates conversation and takes what you are reading to another level of thinking, where as just reading and taking in, you are now thinking critically to provide feedback. As presented in the annotations above I like to provide my insight on the claims and provide feedback towards the situation. Another way of actively engaging this text is through the assigned work we were to do after the text annotationg. For this specific source, we were to free write about the essay itself. This was a very useful way of incorporating the informal responses by making us write what came to mind after our first encounter with this text. The incorporation of this informal responses turned the essay from an active reading session into a more well rounded learning process incorporating the fact that we had to provide our own input towards the text.

Annotations From Galen Strawson’s “I am not a story”

Informal Reading Response: Blog #13

After reading Galen Strawson’s article I agreed and disagreed upon many of her many points. One of her major points she brings up is the idea of having many selves rather than just a single self. I totally agree with this statement to an extent, I agree that moods essentially need to be different for whatever the task at hand may be , but I would not consider it to the extreme in saying it Is a different self. For example the way I would converse with a boss at a job or even other employees would be very different than if I were to have a conversation with a life long friend. Even taking it to another level talking to a customer would be a very different attitude than to a coworker. I truly feel her points about other selves are necessary. If we were not able to switch the gears for these tasks I feel like the world overall would turn dull, the stress feeling before giving a presentation would be much different if the same attitude and mood was used if you were talking to a group of friends. I feel like as a society this idea of many selves is necessary, otherwise it would lead in one of two extremes: chaos or dullness. A point she brings up I was not really fond of had to do with the idea of self control being a personality trait. I ultimately feel  like the way she looked at self control that she conceptualized it in not the best way. I personally do not feel that this is a personality trait due to the fact that so many other things can tie into it. The basis of self control comes from inherited traits in my opinions as you can see not always in every case but a great deal that children have similar controls that their parents possess. That is of course until teenage years where I then feel like personality could tie into the idea of self control and also the rebellious mindset of the teen.  A question for us to think about was to think of a time we thought our life may have been impeded. I truly feel like that had happened to me during my high school years where events were not geared in the best direction and I ultimately did not think I was capable of achieving certain things just based on my own self ideas that I was not good enough or that my background and past would physically and mentally block me from moving on.