Rhetorical Reading Strategies And The Construction Of Meaning By Christina Haas And Linda Flower Summary

Christina Haas and Linda Flower both make contributions to writing in their studies about the writing process. They have collaborated on one work, Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning, to comment on a growing notion in the writing field about the reading process. They discuss findings on how rhetorical reading strategies work and why teachers should begin to influence their students with them. The main audience are other teachers. Haas and Flower’s primarily argue that the process of shaping students into literal and receptive readers should switch to shaping students into rhetorical readers, using strategies like trying to account four author’s purpose and context, for more in depth construction of meaning. Haas and

Since they started pouring the concrete for the dam Lake Powell has been a center of controversy. From nature preservationists to ancient ruins advocates the subject has been heated and intense. On the other hand, those who support Lake Powell are just as avid and active in their defense of the reservoir. One of the former, Edward Abbey, sets forth his plea, hoping it does not fall upon deaf ears.

This paper is about the understanding of the Rhetorical Structures as they pertain to audience, purpose, and context and how they affect the argument of whether taxes should be raised on higher income brackets in order to fund social programs for at-risk and underserved, low income children. I will discuss the relationship between the audience, purpose, and context to the context of the argument.

Before reading Haas and Flower’s article, I never read rhetorically. Honestly, I didn’t know rhetorical reading even existed. But after reading the article, I feel as though I could have been doing this all along. In high school it seemed that we weren’t taught this (at least not at my school). In high school, I thought I was a “good reader”. I was efficient at multiply choice question based on information on the text, but struggled on getting the claim and explaining it. In the text Haas and Flower stated “More experienced readers had inferred the claim much earlier” (Haas & Flower 424). More experienced readers have grasped the concept of reading rhetorically. In paragraph twenty-one “Kara, a freshman… and reads on to confirm his hypothesis.”

Reeves’ chapter on Metaphors in Science shows just how much we rely on metaphors to communicate complex topics. This chapter is an overview of how we would be unable to communicate or think without metaphors. Reeves gives eye-opening examples throughout the text and makes me realize how people fail to realize how often we rely on metaphors. She also discusses how metaphors aren’t a completely reliable source.

This summer, and again in class, we read the articles The Cost of Survival, The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt, and Unbroken. Over the summer, I just read the texts on a literal level and the only text-marking that I did was I highlighted important parts and summarized each paragraph. I didn’t even begin to look into what else the author could possibly mean other than what he/she said on the page. Although, when we re-read and text-marked these articles, I did something very different. I looked into the deeper meaning of what the characters, word choice and plot that the author chose to use, means and what new ideas that they brought to the text by reading each paragraph carefully and questioning why the author did certain things that brought me to something that I had never found before. The difference between the two is that in the first read is that I didn’t fully understand the text. I just wrote summaries on the side of the piece. I didn’t have any idea of what any different meaning was than the obvious meaning. In my second read I found and understood deeper

In the article, Making Sense of Texts, Rebecca Harper of Georgia Regents University discusses ways in which students interpret unfamiliar texts based on Rosenblatt’s Transitional Theory. Rosenblatt’s Transitional Theory of Reading and Writing is the exchange that occurs between a reader and the texts (2004). Meaning each reader interprets the reading through their own thoughts and experiences. Rosenblatt’s reasoning intel’s that readers relate to the texts based on signs which link them to the subject.

This is what I think extraordinary perusers are able to be mixed up in; the individuals who have read of everything, are thought to comprehend everything as well; yet it is not generally so. Perusing outfits the brain just with materials of information; it is feeling that makes what we read our own. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is insufficient to pack ourselves with an incredible heap of accumulations ; unless we bite them over once more, they won't give us quality and support.

Comprehension is a complex and multi-faceted concept, but most researchers agree that the construction of meaning from text is a central component to reading (Lyon & Moats, 1997; Perfetti & Adolf, 2012). It occurs when the reader builds on one or more mental representations of the meaning of a text (Kintsch & Rawson, 2005). These mental representations are not only constructed at the lexical level (word identification), but also occur at higher sentence level involving syntactic processes. In understanding a text, the reader has to recognise the words, retrieve their appropriate meaning within the contexts, and construct phrases from words (Perfetti & Adolf, 2012). In other words, it is an active process in which the reader has to engage in an intentional and thoughtful interaction with the text (NICHD, 2000).

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson banded together and wrote an article titled “How Metaphor Gives Meaning to Form.” Their

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson state in their article, Metaphors We Live By, that “…metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action” (3). They are saying that metaphors are used all the time, and not just when people talk, but metaphors are used in how people think and act too. I agree with this statement because after reading Lakoff and Johnson, I have become more aware of the metaphors I use in everyday life to describe everything, and I use the metaphors more than I thought. Barbara Tomlinson backs Lakoff and Johnson’s statement up by presenting readers, in her article, Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision, with a select variety of metaphors many different writers use when

“Reading is a major strand of literacy, and an interactive process between the reader, text, and context. It is the platform on which the other strands of literacy are built. Reading involves knowledge of the structure of language, the purpose for

The purpose for reading also determines the appropriate approach to reading comprehension. A person who needs to know whether she can afford to eat at a particular restaurant needs to comprehend the pricing information provided on the menu, but does not need to recognize the name of every appetizer listed. A person reading poetry for enjoyment needs to recognize the words the poet uses and the ways they are put together, but does not need to identify main idea and supporting details. However, a person using a scientific article to support an opinion needs to know the vocabulary that is used, understand the facts and cause-effect sequences that are presented, and recognize ideas that are presented as hypotheses and givens.

In Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003)’s cognitive linguistic view of metaphor, often recognized as the CMT, they point out that human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. According to them, metaphor, in essence, is “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 5).Concerning the nature

For them metaphor is a matter of thought rather than language. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) extended the definition of metaphor further and introduced Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). They claim that concepts are metaphorically structured, so metaphors play a significant role in organizing and functioning ideas in human conceptual system. They define metaphor not only as thinking about something in terms of something else, but also experiencing something as something else. Since human activities and experiences are metaphorical, we talk about things in the way that we perceive them. Human conceptual system is structured by metaphors, in other words, it is metaphoric in nature. This is grounded in experience and culture. Some metaphors are so deeply rooted in human thought that they are metaphors we live by or they are conceptual in nature (Lakoff and