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Rhetorical Reading Strategies and Construction
of Meaning

• Christina Haas and Linda Flower

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Who are you as a reader?

• What are you good at, as a reader?
• What do you think youre not good at when it
  comes to reading?
• Is there anything you wish you had been taught
  better or differently?

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What are Haas and Flower adding to the
conversation?

• Niche our knowledge of how readers actually
  carry out this interpretive process with
  college-level expository texts is rather limited
  (122).
• Occupying the niche we observed a sharp
  distinction between the rhetorical process these
  experienced readers demonstrated and the
  processes of freshman readers (123).

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What is the central difference between
experienced and inexperienced readers?
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Methodology

• think-aloud procedure (122)
• Ten readers four experienced, three average
  inexperienced, three above average inexperienced
• Coding content strategies, feature strategies,
  rhetorical strategies

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Findings
Students Experienced Readers
Content strategies 77 67
Feature strategies 22 20
Rhetorical strategies 1 13
WOW!
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Do you read rhetorically?

• How do you compare?
• How can you change your reading strategies to be
  more successful?

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Using what you know

• One claim this article makes is that when readers
  try to understand texts, they bring their own
  knowledge to them. What kinds of knowledge did
  you bring to this article that helped you make
  sense of it?

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Developing a reading strategy

• Kantz and Haas and Flower agree that students
  should have strategies to read rhetorically (75,
  136). Kantz suggests teaching students a set of
  heuristics based on rhetorical situation (75).
• Lets do it.

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Creating a heuristic for rhetorical reading

• What kinds of questions should you ask yourself
  as youre reading to make sense of difficult
  material?

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Testing our heuristic

• Lets read the following passages to see if our
  heuristic works.

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• The series exists to show gigantic and hideous
  robots hammering one another. So it does. The
  last hour involves a battle for the universe
  which for some reason is held at the corner of
  Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive in Chicago. This
  battle is protracted mercilessly beyond all
  reason, at an ear-shattering sound level, with
  incomprehensible Autobots and Decepticons sliced
  up into spurts of action with no sense of the
  space they occupy.

13

• Of course, solving sexism isn't just a matter of
  a handful of women making it to the top. New
  Zealand still has issues with domestic violence
  and there is a 12 wage gap. (No, Thompson, there
  really, really is.) But the U.N. still ranks New
  Zealand as the fifth most gender-equal society in
  the world, behind only Iceland, Sweden, Norway,
  and Finland. (For comparison The U.K. was ranked
  15th, Australia was 20th, and the U.S., where the
  wage gap is a whopping 23, came in at 31st.) So
  to hear the head of the Employers and
  Manufacturers' Association a fairly mainstream
  pro-business lobbying group say that women are
  bad employees because they're, like, always
  getting their periods and stuff is just bizarre.

14

• This shows that the deficit and debt is a
  spending problem, not a revenue problem.
  President Bush, with both Democrat and Republican
  Congresses, did lose control of spending during
  his presidency, as federal spending as a percent
  of GDP rose by one-seventh during his two terms.
  But President Obama, once he got behind the
  steering wheel, accelerated madly in precisely
  the wrong direction, increasing federal spending
  by nearly one-third in his first three years, and
  proposing in his 2012 budget to increase it by
  nearly two-thirds more by 2021. Adding that on
  top of our exploding entitlements, which
  ObamaCare made worse by adopting or expanding
  three new entitlements, is how Americas Ticking
  Bankruptcy Bomb was lit, as I explain in my new
  book with the same title.

15

• O.K., the obvious question If Medicare is so
  much better than private insurance, why didnt
  the Affordable Care Act simply extend Medicare to
  cover everyone? The answer, of course, was
  interest-group politics realistically, given the
  insurance industrys power, Medicare for all
  wasnt going to pass, so advocates of universal
  coverage, myself included, were willing to settle
  for half a loaf. But the fact that it seemed
  politically necessary to accept a second-best
  solution for younger Americans is no reason to
  start dismantling the superior system we already
  have for those 65 and over.

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• To date no examination of composing processes has
  dealt primarily with unskilled writers. As long
  as average or skilled writers are the focus, it
  remains unclear as to how process research will
  provide teachers with a firmer understanding of
  the needs of students with writing problems.