Description: Describing What a Text Does
Read an essay
about AIDS, and you think about AIDS.
But you can also think about the essay. Does it discuss preventive
strategies or medical treatments?
Or
both?
Does it describe AIDS symptoms or
offer statistics? Is the disease presented as a contagious disease, a
Biblical
scourge, or an individual experience?
What evidence is relied on?
Does
it quote medical authorities or offer anecdotes from everyday people?
Does it appeal to reason or emotions?
These are not questions about what a textsays, but about what
the textdoes.They are not about AIDS, but aboutthe discussionof
AIDS.
This
second level of reading is concerned not only with understanding
individual
remarks, but also with recognizing the structure of a discussion.
We examine what a text does to convey
ideas.
We might read this way to
understand how an editorial justifies a particular conclusion, or how a
history
text supports a particular interpretation of events.
At
the previous level of reading, restatement, we demonstrated
comprehension by
repeating the
thought of the text.
Here we are
concerned with describing the discussion:
- what topics are
discussed?
- what examples
and evidence are used?
- what
conclusions are reached?
We
want to recognize and describe how evidence is marshaled to reach a
final
position, rather than simply follow remarks from sentence to sentence.
This
level of reading looks at broad portions of the text to identify the
structure
of the discussion as a whole.
On
completion, we can not only repeat what the text says, but can also
describe
what the text does.
We can identify how
evidence is used and how the final points are reached.
|