Dear Reader,
While the art of reading is as old as the printed word, the act of reading is fresh each time we undertake it. As readers, we bring out attitudes, our moods, and our experiences to the act of reading each time we sit down with a text. Through reading, reacting and thinking, we develop sound ideas.
Of course, " reading" is more than processing word on a page. Reading is also a multimedia experience. Because many readers benefit greatly from hearing ideas discuss, we include audio content, including discussions from Forum, a feature of KQED, San Francisco's National Public Radio affiliate and the country most's popular and listened to public radio station. You will find these audio programs complement and enhance your understanding of the reading and images found in this book.
Readers also benefit from seeing photographs or illustrations of ideas. You will find an arresting selection of photographs and illustrations of ideas. You will find an arresting selection of photographs and illustrations that will highlight the themes of the reading in the book. You will also find selections from graphic novels, which bring images and story together in fresh ways.
The ideas generated by the text, the photos, the graphics, and the sounds are relevant to our lives, timely, contemporary and often exciting and controversial, worth exploring and working through for themselves in prose composition. Embedded in Sound ideas are the ideals of a well-rounded education, one that connect you to the world you are in.
In the process of understanding the texts we have assembled here- whether non-fiction, fiction, poetry, audio programs, or images- we hope you will bring your own experiences and knowledge to bear you on your understanding.
In this process, we hope you will...
....understand
The complexity of a single topic goes beyond being " for" or "against" an idea. Sound ideas are by nature multifaceted, and we chose texts, images, and audio programs that we hope illustrate this idea.
...React
Think seriously about what you have read, and how you feel about it. Did it ring true for you? Seem completely alien? Think beyond whether you enjoyed reading a particular text, seeing an image, or listening an interview or panel discussion. Consider the elements of each that engaged, or failed to engage you.
...Discuss.
The details of the ideas are often worked out in writing. In fact, many writers claim that they dont know what they think until they write it down. Find ways to respond to these selections in writing - whether informally in a journal, or formally through class assignments, You will find that the act of writing is intricately tied to the act of reading, viewing and listening.
As you think through the ideas and respond to what you hear and read you will find a clarity of thought that initiates, and even ensure clarity in your own writing.
Synthesizing what you learn from reading and listening involves understanding the past and anticipating you own future. Situate yourself within the reading, visual, and audio selections. This will help you not only understand the ideas of others but also understand yourself. In the process, we hope you discover your own sound ideas while experiencing these different types of texts
THE READING-WRITING PROCESS
Reading and writing go hand in hand. At the end of each chapter in this text you will find several topics for writing, or your instructor may give you other writing assignments.
The assignment in this text are divided into four categories: creative choices, narrative/ expository choices, rhetorical choices, and research choice.
Creative choices
Writing creatively about what you read can help you form important connections between your own experience and the experiences written about by the authors in the chapters. Writing in a journal, writing poetry, or even drawing images of the ideas you encounter in your reading can help refine your thinking.
Narrative/Expository Choices
These choices are the more "traditional" responses to reading, often asking you take a position with clear, concrete examples, and argumentation.
Rhetorical Choices
Fashioning an argument or a position, persuading your readers of your point of view, is fundamental to good expository and effective critical writing. Argumentation and Persuasion is, in fact, a rhetorical model for structuring your ideas, as are such rhetorical approaches as analysis, illustration, classification, definition, comparison and contrast, and diction and tone. You will have a separate set of questions following each of these selections that are design to help you organize your ideas around argument and the use of various rhetorical methods of organizations.
Research Choices
These writing choices ask you to go beyond what is found in the book and investigate a question or idea further. Research, in this case, however, does not mean just a trip to the library or some searching on the internet. It might entail interviewing those with different experiences than yours, or observing behavior or object in your own environment.
The following selections expand on the idea of academic reading and writing, and can help guide in your efforts to become a successful reader and writer.
READING AND WRITING
The beginning of good writing comes from critical reading and thinking about ideas. Critical reading and thinking means an active participation in the process- considering the strengths and weaknesses of ideas, relating them to your own observations or experience, and questioning the completeness or truth of what you have been presented.
In the first reading, the author of the classic text How to Read a Book talk about the critical reading process. This text also talks about different kinds of reading and how each serve a different purpose. As you read this selection, think about your own reading process the author descirbes.
THE ACTIVITY AND ART OF READING
Mortimer J. Adler and Charler Van Doren
Mortimer J. Adler was an author, educator and philosopher. He was born in New York.City in 1902 and moved to California, where he lived much of his life. He died in 2001. Adler wrote over fifty books, including How to Read a Book (1940, revised 1972) ( from which the following except is taken); The American Testament (1975); The common Sense of Politics (1971); Aristole for Everyone (1978); Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985); and Art, the Art and the Great Ideas (1994). Adler was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and also editor of the sixty - volume The Great Books of the Western World. He helped create the Great Books reading program, a book discussion program with chapter throughout the United States in which participants read and discuss classic texts. He was a professor at several universities including Colombia University and The University of Chicago. He received his PhD before getting a high school Diploma. Adler was also the founder of the Institute for Philosophical Research and was instrument in founding the Aspen Institute, an organization that engages lenders in business, academic and politics.
The Goals of Reading:
Reading for Information and Reading for Understanding
You have a mind. Now let us suppose that you also have a book that you want to read. The book consists of language written by someone for the sake of communicating something to you. Your success in reading it is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer intended to communicate.
That. of course is too simple. The reason is that there are two possible relations between your mind and the book, not just one. These two relations are exemplified by two different experiences that you can have in reading your book.
There is the book and here is your mind. As you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly everything the author has to say or you do not. If you do, you may have gain information, but you could not have increased your understanding. If the book is completely intelligible to you from start to finish, then the author and you are as two minds in the same mold. The symbols on the pages merely express the common understanding you had before you met. Let us take our second alternative. You do not understand the book perfectly. Let us even assume-what unhappily is not always true- that you understand enough to know that you do not understand it all. You know the book has more to say than you understand and hence that it contains something that can increase your understanding.
What do you do then? You can take the book to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have him explain the parts that trouble you. ("He" may be a living person or another book- a commentary or text-book). Or you may decide that what is over your head is not worth bothering about, that you understand enough. In either case, you are not doing the job of reading that the book requires.
That is done only one way. Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book. With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves.
Thus we can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follow: the process whereby a mind with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matters, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.
To pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own intellectual effort in reading is something like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It certainly feels that way. It is a major exertion. Obviously, too, the things that are usually regarded as more difficult to read, and hence as only for the better reader, are those that are more likely to deserve and demand this kind of reading.
The distinction between reading for information and reading for understanding is deeper than this. Let us try to say more about it. We will have to consider both goals of reading because the line between what is readable in one way and what must be read in other is often hazy. To the extent that we can keep these two goals of reading distinct, we can employ the word " reading" in two distinct senses.
The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us. Such things may increase our store of information, but they can not improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth-that is if we were both alert and honest.
The second one is the sense in which a person try to read something that at first he does not completely understand. Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader's understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by " learning" is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.
There is clearly no difficulty of an intellectual sort about gaining new information in the course of reading if the new facts are of the same sort as those you already know. A person who knows some of the facts of American history and understands them in a certain light can readily acquire by reading , in the first sense, more such facts and understand them in the same light. But suppose he is reading a history that seeks not merely to give him some more facts but also to throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts he knows. Suppose there is greater understanding available here than he possessed before he started to read. If he can manage to acquire that greater understanding, he is reading in the second sense. He has indeed elevated himself by his activity, though indirectly, of course, the elevation was made possible by the writer who has something to teach him.
What are the conditions under which this kind of reading-reading for understanding-take places? There are two. First, there is initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be superior to the reader in understanding, and his book must convey in readable form the insights he possesses and his potential readers lack. Second, the reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always, approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.
In short, we can learn only from our " better". We must know who they are and how to learn from them. The person who has this sort of knowledge possesses the art of reading in the sense with which we are especially concerned in this book. Everyone who can read at all probably has some ability to gradually gain more by our efforts through applying them to more rewarding materials.
We do not want to give the impression that facts, leading to increased information, and insights, leading to increased understanding, are always easy to distinguish. And we would admit that sometimes a mere recital of facts can itself lead to greater understanding. The point we want to emphasize here is that his book is about the art of reading for the sake of increased understanding. Fortunately, if you learn to do that, reading for information will usually take care of itself.
Of course, there is still another goal of reading, besides gaining information and understanding, and that is entertainment. However this book will not be much concerned with reading for entertainment . It is the least demanding kind of reading, and it requires the least amount of effort. Furthermore, there are no rules for it. Everyone who knows how to read at all can read for entertainment if he wants to.
In fact, any book that can be read for understanding or information can probably be read for entertainment as well, just as a book that is capable of increasing our understanding can also be read purely for the information
