8/24/12 Caroline Eberhart ENC 1101 11:30

Summary Haas, Christina, and Linda Flower. Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning. Writing About Writing. Eds. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 120-138. Print. Haas and Flower did research to find out the differences between experienced and non-experienced readers. They used a think aloud method where they had all different level of readers read an article that did not require any perceived information. All the readers would verbally give their feedback of what they just read. Haas and Flower found an answer. They discovered that more than half of students used content strategies when reading, less than half used feature strategies, and a very small percent used rhetorical strategies. Rhetorical strategies cannot be easily taught. Rhetorical reading is a skill that needs to be acquired comes from lots and lots of experience. College readers tend to only summarize and paraphrase when reading. Critical and experienced readers define rhetorical reading.

Analysis I would have to agree with Haas and Flower about their conclusions. The only way I know how to get through a difficult reading is by paraphrasing. I try to rearrange the words into what makes sense to me. I am not experienced when it comes to difficult readings such as this one, so comprehending, summarizing, and analyzing was a challenge. I didnt understand that only 1% of readers Haas and Flower tested used rhetorical strategies when reading when rhetorical reading is what the best and most experienced readers use. I think we are reading this article because it applies to first-year writing classes, which we are. The topic of the article directly relates to our class because we all need to continue reading difficult pieces, such as this one, to further our studies of becoming rhetorical readers. The purpose of us reading this article was to learn how to use cues in the text and our own knowledge in discourse situations to re-create the rhetorical situation in the text.