Sample Critical Reading of Article with Commentary

To read critically, you need to read actively, which means doing more than simply underlining or highlighting sections of text that strike you as you read. Underlining or highlighting text is only useful if you also “write back”—which means making comments and notes about what you underline or highlight as you go.

Writing back gives you lots of ammunition when you are writing in a timed-writing exam. Your expressed ideas are there for the taking—you don’t have to try to work out what it was that interested you when you first read the article because your notes tell you.

In addition, after your initial reading it is useful to do some invention work. Even though you don’t know what the prompt for the Writing Proficiency Exam will be, you know that the readers are going to expect you to use specific examples and details from the text and your own experience to support your ideas. Therefore, it is useful to think about how the ideas in the text and your own knowledge and experience intersect.

Below is a link to our ilocker site where you will find an excellent example of “writing back.” This student used writing back, clustering, and comparison of ideas as part of her preparation for the Writing Proficiency Exam. This kind of mark-up is certainly acceptable—it is actually what we would like to see everyone doing with their copies of the article!

• Follow the link below, and enter using your BSU ID and password.
• Open the file called “Sample Essay and Student Mark Up.”
• Once there, open the file “Sample Student Mark Up.”
• A dialog box will open because the file is protected; use the password “writingcomp” to open the PDF file.

Because of copyright issues, only portions of the article are available, but you should look through the whole PDF document to see what this student did.

Click on the little yellow notes to see commentary about the student’s work.

The link to ilocker is the following:
http://ilocker.bsu.edu/users/writingcomp/BSU_SHARED