CRITICAL READING

By Marcia C. Bonamin

AIMS OF CRITICAL READING

 RECOGNIZE AUTHOR´S PURPOSES

 RECOGNIZE AUTHOR´S POINT OF VIEW
 MAKE INFERENCES
 MAKE CONCLUSIONS
 TELL FACTS AND OPINIONS APART

FACTS X OPINION
FACTS

 Can be verified in reference books, official records, and so forth.

 Are expressed in concrete language or specific numbers.
 Once verified, are generally agreed on by people.

Ex.: The World Cup was held in Brazil in 2014

OPINIONS

 Are based on subjective judgment and personal values rather than on information
that can be verified

Ex.: Mineral water is excellent for the skin

 Can be validated when:

(a) the author is a reliable authority on a specific topic

(b) the author supports his/her point of view on facts or other reliable
authorities.

Ex.: Government officials should curb the violence wave that is occurring in São Paulo.
According to DataFolha, 90% of violent acts occur when the authorities are not
strict.

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 FACT X OPINION TEXTS OR MEDIA?

INSTRUCTION MANUAL NEWS REPORTS

NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL ENCYCLOPEDIA
ADVERTISEMENT BOOK REVIEW
MEDICINE BULE FACEBOOK/WHATSAPP

COMPLETE THESE SENTENCES IN ORDER THAT THEY ARE TRUE TO YOU

Mothers are ___________________________________________________________________

Teachers are ___________________________________________________________________

Soccer players are _______________________________________________________________

FACTS

Here are some examples of the language we use to express facts:

 This review has demonstrated.......

 According to the results of the latest poll......
 The latest findings confirm......
 Researchers have recently discovered......

Remember: reliable authority, news source, statistics (numbers)

OPINIONS

Are expressed by :

 COMPARISONS

(the strongest, less, the most, the least, greater, far more/less )

Ex.: The painter Pablo Picasso was far more innovative than any other artist.

 EVALUATION

Ex: The excellence of her science project was a model for other students.

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Some evaluation adjectives are:

(a) brilliant, effective , trustworthy, unreliable, suspicious, interesting

(b) a lot, very much, so much, little

Ex.: The governor isn’t trustworthy because his oldest son is in prison.

 LINGUISTIC ITEMS THAT SUGGEST SOME DOUBT IN THE WRITER'S MIND:

1. Expressions: (it’s possible; it seems; it’s probable, maybe)

 It appears she was confused.

 She seems to have the qualifications for the position.
 They probably used dirty tricks to win.
 In professor Smith’s view………
 Most experts in this field suspect that

2. Modal verbs: (Can, Could, Should, May, Might, Will, Would)

 Cigarettes can cause cancer

 Martha may win the elections

3. Passive Voice (By hiding or relocating the subject)

 The survivors were rescued and are in good health conditions.

 It´s said that cigarretes cause cancer.

AUTHORS OFTEN MIX FACTS WITH OPINION

Indians "world's biggest readers"

Indians are the world's biggest bookworms, reading on average 10.7 hours a
week, twice as long as Americans, according to a new survey. Maybe self-help
and reflexive reading could explain India's high figures.

Britons and Americans scored 50% lower than the Indians' hours and
Japanese and Koreans were even lower at 4.1 and 3.1 hours respectively.
R Sriram, chief executive officer of Crosswords Bookstores, a chain of 26 book
shops around India, says Indians are extremely entrepreneurial and reading "is
a fundamental part of their being". Since nothing is stable, next year’s results
may change this perspective

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 LANGUAGE CHOICE

Special effects can be created through the choice of

(a) content: a specific topic;
(b) language: vocabulary or grammar structures;
(c) structure: the organization of ideas

CONTENT
Ideas or arguments that can be supported and from which a conclusion can be reached

LANGUAGE
Use of synthatic or semantic structures focusing on a special aspect of a topic.

STRUCTURE
- rank items according to its importance, size, location, etc.
- chronology
- from general to specific
- comparisons
- cause and consequence

CONTENT  WHAT IT IS SAID

LANGUAGE  HOW IT IS SAID
STRUCTURE  HOW THE IDEAS ARE INTERCONNECTED

Text 1
Don’t text while driving

January 13, 2013, filed under Society, Tragedies.

Standard Podcast [2:02m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download
Since November 2009, it has been illegal to use a mobile phone while driving. This includes making
phone calls, answering phone calls and texting. Hands-free phones are legal; however, they can also
distract drivers. A driver needs to pay attention 100% of the time and phone calls are a distraction.

More and more people have a mobile phone so the problem is becoming a bigger one. Police said that
13,000 drivers were caught last year using their phones while driving. There were at least 150 crashes
caused by talking on phones or texting.

One woman last June lost control of her car while texting and her car went over a bank. A tree stopped
the fall 9m down the bank. Luckily she was wearing a seat belt and was not killed. Another woman was
probably texting when her car crossed the centre line and hit another car. The woman was killed and
the driver and passengers in the other car were badly injured.

Police say that you should put your phone in the glove box while you are driving. If that is still a
temptation, put the phone in the boot of the car.

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Text 2
BOOK REVIEW

Mestizaje in Ibero-America, Claudio Esteva-Fabregat. John Wheat. Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1987, 300 pg.

Susan Kellog
University of Houston.
This lengthy, sometimes repetitive volume treats an issue of tremendous significance for both historical
and contemporary Latin American its history of racial mixing. Of potential interest to anthropologists,
ethno-historians and historians, this chronicling of mestizaje sheds little new light on miscegenation and
its broad effect in the many different countries and regions of Latin America.
Ambitions in his goals, Claio Esteva-Fabregat – an eminent Spanish cultural anthropologist – draws
mainly on a wide range of secondary sources, demographic, biological, historical, and ethnographic in
nature.

Text 3
Brazilian Nightclub Fire Kills Scores; Dozens Wounded
Bloomberg - By Stephan Nielsen - Jan 27, 2013

A band’s fireworks display at a nightclub in Brazil early this morning turned deadly, killing more
than 230 and injuring dozens when it set the building ablaze, according to police and televised
reports.

Most of the victims at the club in Santa Maria, a city in southern Brazil with a number of
universities, were students who died from smoke inhalation and some may have perished as
they attempted to leave from the club’s exit doors, Andre Diefenbach, an official with the
municipality’s police department, said today by telephone.

There may have been as many as 900 people in the club, which has a capacity of about 2,000
people, said Diefenbach, the police official. The incident may be the worst fire in Brazil’s history
since 1961, when 503 people died at a circus in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the newspaper
Folha D. Sao Paulo said today. Brazil is seeking to improve its safety record ahead of the 2014
World Cup.

In 2004, a blaze at a rock concert in a Buenos Aires killed 193, and the nightclub owner was
convicted of manslaughter. In the U.S., fireworks led to the death of 100 people at a club in
Warwick, Rhode Island, in 2003 when a pyrotechnics malfunction ignited foam used as
soundproofing on the club’s walls. About 200 people were injured.