Engaging in Critical Reading: A Guide

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What this Guide Contains

This Guide contains support for critical reading, which is an important skill to develop in
this course and make use of both here and elsewhere in your education and working life.
Some of you will already have cultivated critical reading skills, others will need to develop
them as we go. Always, you will do some “customizing” to make the process work for you.
Even if you’re feeling confident about your critical reading abilities, you may find some
advantage to the handout.

Some Guidance for Critical Reading1

Reading articles for this course is unlike textbook reading. In textbook reading, your main
goal is to understand the concept. That’s important for acquiring technical knowledge. In
this course, our goal is not only to understand but also to critique. The articles here are not
chosen so that you accept what they say as “true”, but so that you wrestle with the ideas. In
fact, your instructors do not necessarily agree with these articles, but we do find them
worth wrestling with as we try to gain a deeper understanding of interaction between
society, technology, and the environment.
Critical reading can be done in four main steps:
1. Pre-reading—the stage at which you frame your understanding of the reading and
establish what perspective you are bringing to the job
2. Skimming for content and Structure—a stage of making a quick pass through the
document to get a gist of what is important and where it is going
3. Reading for understanding—this is the most time consuming stage where you read,
make notes, and get the substance of the argument
4. Developing a response—as you read (and after) you need to consider how the ideas fit
with what you already know, what you might find challenging, what might need further
kinds of evidence or argument to be persuasive.
1. Pre-Reading
Here are three things you can do before you begin to help you focus your attention;
1. In first year, you should have learned to use the “CRAAP Test” to evaluate sources.2
That test offers a first step in pre-reading to prepare you to get the most out of an
article (as well as being a good way to assess articles in doing research). Look at one of
the readings for the course, what key points related to CRAAP do you notice?
For example:
• Postman is more than 20 years old. Is the reading still “current”? Classic?
• Readings come from a variety of publication types; some academic peer-reviewed,
some from popular media. Do the authors hold authority, regardless of the
publication type?

1 UTSC offers advice on critical reading that forms the basis of this guide. You can find their guide here.

2 You can find The U of T Library’s guide to the CRAAP test here.

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2. Try looking up the author(s) in Google. Where are they from? What is their expertise?
Does that give you confidence or reluctance as you read the article?
3. Consider your own attitudes. Even before you try to read an article, what are your
thoughts about the title? What are you expecting?
2. Skimming for Content and Structure
Skimming through a reading is actually a strategic skill. First, you need to read a little to
know what you’re skimming for. An article that is easy to skim has meaningful headings
that can give us a quick sense of how the article works and what it will talk about.
Use the First Paragraph
Read the first paragraph or two in their entirety. They often provide good guidance to what
we can expect in the reading as a whole. This is less true in book chapters (and some of our
readings are book chapters) because book structure counts on you getting some context
from the introduction and previous chapters.
By reading the first paragraphs you should get a sense of what is going to be discussed in
the article as a whole. Introductions are important. As you read the first paragraph try to
determine two key things:
1. What does the writer say is their purpose? Sometimes this is clearly stated, but often
in longer articles it requires us to piece it together. Take a minute and jot down what
you think the writer is trying to say or prove in the article. You may revise that later,
but this will help you get started.
2. What does the writer tell us about how the article is organized? Sometimes writers
explicitly state the structure using words like “in the first section”. Sometimes they
just raise big ideas that will get developed later. See if you can find these in the first
couple of paragraphs. If you can, it will help you see the shape of the whole paper.
(Note: in Praxis I, we talked about the four functions of an introduction. These questions
focus on two of those: “purpose” and “set-up”).
Skim Headings
Many articles have useful headings. You can skim headings or first paragraphs of sections
and get a pretty quick overview of the whole article. If the headings make sense, or even if
they are consistent with what you deduced from the set-up you can use them to help your
brain prepare to read and understand.
Skim Topic Sentences
To skim an article effectively, you need to read the first sentences of paragraphs—often
these will be topic sentences—at least for part of the article. If you don’t worry too much
about getting any detail, you can often discover quickly how an article works.
You get the order of the information and the writer’s sense of their own logic. This is one
of the advantages of doing a skim through the first lines of the paragraphs. It helps give a
sense of what the article is about. With this simplified understanding, we will be able to
read the entire article more efficiently and with more depth. For the purpose of critical
reading, depth is more important, but we certainly understand your need for efficiency too.
You may feel like you’re wasting time by doing the skim, but it will pay off in the end.
Watch for Organizational Signals
Organizational signals are often just words such as “first” and “second” or “however” and
“therefore.” Those “signpost” words warn us to pay attention. As I skim an article, looking

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at the topic sentences, I will also try to watch for this kind of word. Alternatively, you can
do a “Control F” search for the words. These words are useful to help us understand how a
writer is presenting the logic of their ideas.
For example, when I encounter a writer using “three,” I immediately skim down to see
where “first”, “second”, and “third” (or “lastly”) occur so I know I won’t miss the structure.
Sometimes all three occur within a sentence or paragraph, but sometimes each one gets
more than one paragraph. So, it is useful to keep track of those signals.
As you skim, try to get a general idea of what the argument will be, and how the writer is
organizing the overall case. Once you have that, you are then ready to move to the next
phase.
Two final thoughts about this stage:
1. It is hard to judge how long to spend skimming, and it will depend on your own
approach to reading, but a longer article might take 15 minutes or more, whereas a
short one might take you five or less.
2. When you are doing research, you can often stop at this point if you realize the article
is not worth more time. This is how as a researcher you decide what to read.
3. Reading for Understanding
Once you have gained an overview from skimming, you are ready to read with intention. I
find it easier to read a print-out with a pencil, but if I am reading on-screen I make
“comments” on the PDF. These notes—pencil or virtual—become central to my thinking.
Highlighting is far less valuable because it does not help me remember or interpret what I
have read. I do highlight for two things:
• specific phrases or words I think I might want to use again
• organizational signal words that help me see the structure of what’s going on.
I make three kinds of notes as I read. If I were really organized, I would probably colour-
code them, but that’s a level of too many pens for me. My types of notes are:
1. Summary—often I will try to encapsulate an idea in a few words—ideal for me is 2-3
words but sometimes I write more.
2. Definitions—writers use words in their own ways. I might make a note about how the
author is defining a concept. It is dangerous to assume that because I know the meaning
of a word, I know what it means here. Alternatively, I might need to look up a concept,
and if I do I want to make a note about that term to be sure that I am understanding
the article correctly.
3. Reaction—sometimes I read something and I agree or disagree, or I make a connection
(to another reading, to life), so I want to react. These connections and responses are
important because they help me make (and change) my response as I proceed.
You should create your own system, but it’s useful to understand what you want to
accomplish as you read, and use notes to help you get there.
4. Developing a Response
This is the most fun part about critical reading. You will be doing this as you read for sure,
but it is often useful to pause after reading and ask yourself, “So what?” To make your ‘so
what’ more significant and meaningful, you might ask any of the interpretive or evaluative

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questions from the UTSC handout on critical reading. I’m reproducing some of them here to
give you a starting point (and offering some commentary):
• What kinds of reasoning (historical, psychological, political, philosophical, scientific, etc)
are employed?
• Is the argument logically consistent? Convincing?
These two are a really important for us. In the world of engineering and science,
methods, experimentation, and measurable evidence are all crucial to making an
argument, but that is only one form of argumentation. What forms of evidence do
writers use? For instance, examples can never be definitive, but can they be
representative, suggestive, or convincing?
• What theory is developed? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the theory? How
would competing theories criticize this text? How could the author reply?
In reading critically, we need to keep competing theories in mind, but at the
beginning we do not know those theories. So, after week one, keep Postman and
Nightingale in mind. You may need to come back to those two from time to time.
• How might my reading of the text be biased? Am I imposing 21st century ideas or values
on the text? If so, is this problematic or necessary?
• How does the article contribute to the discipline? Are its main conclusions original?
This is difficult to answer when we are first entering into the readings in a new field
(whether this one or any other). However, as we start to read more, we may begin to
see common elements that get shared in a field.
As you gain confidence with these steps, you can customize your approach to critical
reading, and you will begin to apply it more broadly to much more of what you read.

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