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Effective Reading Strategies Explained

The document discusses reading strategies, focusing on understanding the author's purpose, using context clues for word meanings, and making inferences. It outlines four reasons for writing: to inform, explain, entertain, and persuade, with an emphasis on recognizing persuasive intent. Additionally, it provides methods for deciphering unknown words and making educated guesses based on textual information.

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6 views1 page

Effective Reading Strategies Explained

The document discusses reading strategies, focusing on understanding the author's purpose, using context clues for word meanings, and making inferences. It outlines four reasons for writing: to inform, explain, entertain, and persuade, with an emphasis on recognizing persuasive intent. Additionally, it provides methods for deciphering unknown words and making educated guesses based on textual information.

Uploaded by

xiaoxiao
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Reading Strategies

Author's Purpose
It is often useful to know why someone is writing a text or telling you information. If we know
why someone is doing that, it is easier to notice if we are being tricked.

Among the reasons a text could be written are


[Link] inform – to tell you something (The midterm is on the 14th. Today's homework is…)
[Link] explain/teach – to help you understand something that might be difficult to figure out on
your own.
[Link] entertain – this is just writing and reading for fun
[Link] persuade – to make you believe something or buy something. This is the tricky one as many
authors try to hide persuasion as an explanation or entertainment.

Context Clues
We mostly use context clues to figure out the meanings of words we don't know. There are three
major ways to do this:
[Link] the surrounding words. Many of them offer clues. Example: beautiful and verdant.
Maybe you don't know what verdant means, but you can guess that it's an adjective and that it
has a good meaning because it is connected to the adjective beautiful with the conjunction and.
[Link] synonyms or antonyms. They can help you figure out the meaning. Example: Verdant
trees and green grass. We can guess here that verdant is something that trees are like when the
grass is green, so the meaning is probably similar to the adjective green.
[Link] background knowledge. This is all the stuff you know from before that you could use to
figure out the meaning of the word. I know that I saw the words verdant green in the book
Charlotte's Web, so it's probably some kind of green colour.

Inferences
Once we have the skills to use the context clues, understand what the author's purpose is, and
how to find important details in a text, we can make inferences. Those are educated guesses that
we can make based on the information in the text.

Example: It was raining heavily outside while we were on the field trip. By the end, everybody left
their umbrellas by the entrance of the restaurant and started eating. Except Sheila, who went
upstairs to change her wet clothes.

We can make an inference that she didn't have an umbrella and that she got wet. It doesn't say
so anywhere in the paragraph, but we can safely assume that.

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