Those who view rereading as a crutch are those who either understand a text in one read or those who tend to not spend much time reading. It is a powerful tool to be used in the quest for knowledge. As Foster would allude to, everyone’s life is a quest regardless of how small the reward or how dangerous the road. Thankfully, reading does not often involve dangerous roads, but often leads to a large reward.
Monday, July 27, 2015
Prompt 2: Rereading
Typically when I read, I tend to only
reread two main parts of a text: the difficult to grasp and the annotations I
made while reading; usually, the two coincide. When I reread, the text becomes
much more alive. I pick up on words I may have skipped over as well as start
the process of understanding any elements that prove tough conceptually. If
reading is a bridge to understanding, rereading serves as the support beams by
which the bridge stands firm. Readers rarely comprehend a text in one reading,
and the benefits to another solid looking over might prove to be boundless.
In
my personal experience, scholarly texts require the deepest rereading in
addition to what might be called a simple pre-read. The tasty red meat of a
scholarly article is only sampled in the pre-read. The fine dining of rereading
these intellectual texts involves cutting it open, washing it down with the
wine-colored ink of your favorite pen, and the consumption of the text in small
pieces. The smaller the chunk of text, the more I seem to learn.
Those who view rereading as a crutch are those who either understand a text in one read or those who tend to not spend much time reading. It is a powerful tool to be used in the quest for knowledge. As Foster would allude to, everyone’s life is a quest regardless of how small the reward or how dangerous the road. Thankfully, reading does not often involve dangerous roads, but often leads to a large reward.
Those who view rereading as a crutch are those who either understand a text in one read or those who tend to not spend much time reading. It is a powerful tool to be used in the quest for knowledge. As Foster would allude to, everyone’s life is a quest regardless of how small the reward or how dangerous the road. Thankfully, reading does not often involve dangerous roads, but often leads to a large reward.
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Ryan, I completely agree with the majority of this post. In my experiences, I often tend to reread the passages and sections that I had the most trouble with. These passages are typically the ones that I have marked up much like you described. Although I sometimes only reread these parts of a piece, I think it is also important to reread the piece in its entirety. This is a process I am still training myself to enact. After the second or third reading it may be sufficient to only reread the annotations. I think this would be helpful as it reinforces main ideas. There is only one portion of you post that I would disagree with, and that is the idea that scholarly pieces are most important to be reread. I argue that even the most rudimentary sounding pieces require more than one read as these pieces can hold hidden meaning behind the lines. Overall rereading is a powerful tool, and I agree that it leads to great reward.
ReplyDeleteI couldn’t agree more with the information above, Ryan. The main part of re-reading is going back over the difficult to grasp parts. It’s like a giant puzzle and re-reading allows discovery of new pieces to the puzzle that may have been skimmed over before. It’s like a recovery option when reading. I agree that the scholarly parts require the most re-reading because of the vast information that they hold. I have to say I love the adjectives that were in this blog post, such as the “tasty red meat of a scholarly article”. Re-reading allows me to discover more information and it lets me love reading more. I enjoy it more when I know more of the information and when I create the emotions that are inside the text when reading.
ReplyDeleteRyan,
ReplyDeleteI agree that re-reading is an essential tool in the proper and full understanding of a text. I enjoyed your analogy in which you compared re-reading to the support beams of a bridge that would otherwise collapse without its presence. Without this tool, it is close to impossible to comprehend all that a text has to offer. After reading Foster's book, it becomes apparent to me (even more than before) that literature often displays the author's purpose through use of metaphor and symbolism. As young readers, it is easy to glide over a piece of work without coming close to understanding the author's true intentions. There is always a point to grasp—whether it is social, political, emotional, etc.. I certainly believe that viewing re-reading as a pointless waste of time hinders our own literary growth. Hopefully, people begin to utilize this tool and begin reaping its benefits.