module
ASSIGNED READING
New Supplemental Series: Deep Readings
New supplemental series of readings to support the development as college-level writers.
Probably the most important way to become a better writer is to read sources closely that contribute to bettering your awareness of how good writing is accomplished.
These "Deep Readings" are based on Susan Reynolds's findings in her article, "What You Read Matters More Than You Might Think: Why Deep Reading Makes You a Better Writer."
Read Reynolds to understand that the kinds of reading you do matter just as much as the close reading techniques we will be applying the rest of the term.
"WHAT YOU READ MATTERS MORE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK: WHY DEEP READING MAKES YOU A BETTER WRITER."
Susan Reynolds
Posted Jun 07, 2016
A study published in the International Journal of Business Administration in May 2016 found that what students read in college directly affects the level of writing they achieve. In fact, researchers found that reading content and frequency may exert more significant impacts on students’ writing ability than writing instruction and writing frequency. Students who read academic journals, literary fiction, or general nonfiction wrote with greater syntactic sophistication (more complex sentences) than those who read genre fiction (mysteries, fantasy, or science fiction) or exclusively web-based aggregators like Reddit, Tumblr, and BuzzFeed. The highest scores went to those who read academic journals; the lowest scores went to those who relied solely on web-based content.
The Difference between Deep and Light Reading
Recent research also revealed that “deep reading”—defined as reading that is slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity—is distinctive from light reading—little more than the decoding of words. Deep reading occurs when the language is rich in detail, allusion, and metaphor, and taps into the same brain regions that would activate if the reader were experiencing the event. Deep reading is great exercise for the brain and has been shown to increase empathy since the reader dives deeper and adds reflection, analysis, and personal subtext to what is being read. It also offers writers a way to appreciate all the qualities that make novels fascinating and meaningful—and to tap into his ability to write on a deeper level.
Light reading is equated to what one might read in online blogs or “headline news” or “entertainment news” websites, particularly those that breezily rely on lists or punchy headlines, and even occasionally use emojis to communicate. These types of light reading lack a genuine voice, a viewpoint, or the sort of analyses that might stimulate thought. It’s light and breezy reading that you can skim through and will likely forget within minutes.
Deep Reading Synchronizes Your Brain
Deep reading activates our brain’s centers for speech, vision, and hearing, all of which work together to help us speak, read, and write. Reading and writing engages Broca’s area, which enables us to perceive rhythm and syntax; Wernicke’s area, which impacts our perception of words and meaning; and the angular gyrus, which is central to perception and use of language. These areas are wired together by a band of fibres, and this interconnectivity likely helps writers mimic and synchronize with language and rhythms they encounter while reading. Your reading brain senses a cadence that accompanies more complex writing which your brain then seeks to emulate when writing.
Here are three ways you can use deep reading to fire up your writing brain:
Read Poems
In an article published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, researchers reported finding activity in a “reading network” of brain areas that were activated in response to any written material. In addition, more emotionally charged writing aroused several regions in the brain (primarily on the right side) that respond to music. In a specific comparison between reading poetry and prose, researchers found evidence that poetry activates the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes, parts of the brain linked to introspection. When volunteers read their favorite poems, areas of the brain associated with memory were stimulated more strongly than “reading areas,” indicating that reading poems you love is the kind of recollection that evokes strong emotions—and strong emotions are always good for creative writing.
Read Literary Fiction
Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies—and that makes a writer excellent at creating multilayered characters and situations. Not much research has been conducted on the Theory of Mind (our ability to realize that our minds are different than other people’s minds and that their emotions are different from ours) that fosters this skill, but recent experiments revealed that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective Theory of Mind (understanding others’ emotions) and cognitive Theory of Mind (understanding others’ thinking and state of being), compared with reading nonfiction, popular fiction, or nothing at all. Specifically, these results showed that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances Theory of Mind, and, more broadly, that Theory of Mind may be influenced greater by engagement with true works of art. In other words, literary fiction provokes thought, contemplation, expansion, and integration. Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.
Instead of Watching TV, Focus on Deep Reading
Time spent watching television is almost always pointless (your brain powers down almost immediately), no matter how hard you try to justify it, and reading fluff magazines or lightweight fiction may be entertaining, but it doesn’t fire up your writing brain. If you’re serious about becoming a better writer, spend lots of time deep reading literary fiction and poetry and articles on science or art that feature complex language and that require your lovely brain to think.
Susan Reynolds is the author of Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer. She also coauthored Train Your Brain to Get Happy, and Train Your Brain to Get Rich.
Reynolds, Susan. “What You Read Matters More Than You Might Think: Why Deep Reading Makes You a Better Writer.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 7 June 2016, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/prime-your-gray-cells/201606/what-you-read-matters-more-youmight-think
close_reading_proofed
5 TIPS TO ENHANCE YOUR CLOSE READING SKILLS
“5 Tips to Enhance Your Close Reading Skills.” Proofed, Proofed Inc., 21 Feb. 2021, getproofed.com/writingtips/5-tips-to-enhance-your-close-reading-skills.
Close reading is an important part of studying writing. Typically, this means reading a short passage of text in detail to analyze how it works.
But how do you do this effectively? We have five tips to help you get started:
1. Think about why you’re doing a close reading and create a list of questions you want to answer. These will guide your analysis.
2. Read carefully, take notes, and annotate the text as you read.
3. Look for patterns in the text, including stylistic and thematic repetition.
4. Reread the text several times to make sure you pick out every detail.
5. Summarize your notes before writing up your analysis.
Below, we will look at each of these tips in a bit more detail.
1. Think Before Reading
Close reading involves looking closely at the text. But before you start, you need to have a sense of what you are looking for in your close reading.
If you’re a student, this will probably depend on the paper title or assignment you were set. Or it could just be some aspect of the text you want to explore.
In either case, before you start reading, note a few questions or ideas that interest you about the piece. You might notice other things once you start exploring the text, but you can use these questions as a jumping off point for your analysis.
2. Take Notes as You Read
When you start reading the text, read slowly and take notes. This forces you to pay attention and read actively rather than passively absorb the text.
Exactly what you look for will depend on the text you’re reading. However, you should note down or highlight anything that could be relevant to your analysis or that jumps out at you for some reason. Typically, this will include things like:
• The subject matter and themes of the passage
• Interesting or unusual words and phrases • How the text is structured
• Any imagery, figurative language, or metaphors used by the author
• For works of fiction, the characters and narration
• For poetry, the poetic form used other poetic techniques or devices.
You could also annotate the text directly by highlighting key passages or making notes in the margin. If you want to do this, though, make sure you’re allowed first. Librarians may get upset if you return a book with more writing than it started with!
3. Look for Patterns in the Text
Look for patterns in the text, such as where the author has used repetition or contrast. Patterns like these usually indicate an attempt to stress an idea, draw attention to something, or create a specific tone or rhythm in the text.
These patterns can be thematic (i.e., related to what the text is about) or formal (i.e., related to how the text is written). Or they might be both. For instance, a poet might use rhyme and assonance to make a poem flow in a certain way. But by using those rhymes to connect specific words they can also link or contrast ideas, affecting how we interpret them in the poem. As such, make sure to look for these kinds of connections and contrasts when you are close reading. If a pattern jumps out at you, it is probably there for a reason!
4. Reread the Text
Close reading requires reading a text more than once. This ensures you don’t miss anything important as well as making you engage with the text in a different way.
To start, read the passage in full once to familiarize yourself with it, making notes on anything that jumps out. But after this first read through, focus on an individual element of the text each time, such as its structure, language, or themes. You can also read the passage aloud to get a sense of its rhythm and tone. Doing this will help you spot things you might have missed otherwise since you will be able to focus on one aspect of the text at a time.
5. Summarize Your Thoughts
The final step is to summarize your thoughts. This means organizing your notes in preparation for writing up an analysis. To do this:
• Group notes together under headings, such as “Themes” and “Language.” This will help you spot connections you might have missed before.
• Use your initial notes and your paper/assignment question to select the most relevant details for your analysis. • Think critically about anything from your notes that challenges your initial ideas or that does not seem to fit with your overall analysis.
• Where relevant, paraphrase key ideas in your own words, then compare your version to the original text to make sure you’ve fully understood it.
This will make it easier to approach writing up your work.
“5 Tips to Enhance Your Close Reading Skills.” Proofed, Proofed Inc., 21 Feb. 2021, getproofed.com/writingtips/5-tips-to-enhance-your-close-reading-skills.
In addition to Reynolds above, I am including my first installment of a Deep Reading: Gregory Pence's “Towards a Theory of Work.”
pence_theory_of_work.
Pence, Gregory. “Towards a Theory of Work.” Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader, edited by Kory Schaff, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 93-106. We need a conceptual map which will clarify discussions about work without leading us to inadequate political solutions. I think that the broad strokes of this map are three concepts: labor, workmanship and callings. What I want to show is that using the above tripartite distinction will improve our thinking about work.
We are all acquainted with the fact that some work activities are more pleasant than others. Some work activities are very unpleasant for the worker. Let us call them labor. Paradigms of labor are tilling a field for weeds, occupying a position on an assembly line, and picking up trash along the side of a highway. Laboring is
93
Pence, Gregory. “Towards a Theory of Work.” Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader, edited by Kory Schaff, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 93-106.
generally: (1) repetitious, (2) not intrinsically satisfying, (3) done out of necessity; labor also involves (4) few higher human faculties, and (5) little choice about how and when the work is done.
None of the above conditions are necessary conditions of labor, although together they are sufficient to define labor. Condition (2) above, however, will always be relative to the worker, or in other words, from his point of view. For example, if Jones regards gardening as intrinsically unsatisfying but Smith enjoys it very much, then gardening will be labor for Jones but not for Smith.
Workmanship differs from labor in many ways. Workmanship generally is more satisfying for the worker than labor. Paradigms of workmanship are professional occupations like dentistry and engineering, as well as traditional craftsmanship jobs like carpentry, leatherworking, etc. The general conditions differentiating workmanship from labor include the following: (1) use of higher human faculties, (2) some intrinsic satisfaction in the activity itself, (3) some degree of choice about when work is done and how, (4) pride of the worker in the products of his work. Like the conditions defining labor, none of the above conditions are necessary conditions, although together they are a sufficient condition.
The highest kind of activity involving work is a calling. As the name implies, callings exist when individuals find intrinsic pleasure in their work and when they “identify” themselves with their work. In a calling, one believes that one’s unique abilities “call” one to a certain kind of work. Although the word “calling” has a religious etymology, the concept here is entirely secular. A naturally gifted musician who enjoys music may feel that music is a calling for him based solely on his assessment of his abilities and pleasures. More than any other condition, however, callings have the sense that one’s work has a higher purpose than earning money. One’s work is directed towards accomplishing goals which tie in with larger goals in the community and world. At the same time, callings are always individualized and defined by the relation of the individual to his work. Callings then can have no massterm paradigms. Specific examples of callings are the lives of Gandhi, Einstein, Pasteur, Socrates, and many less-famous individuals. In many ways, one has a calling in the sense in which a person defines his most intimate goals in life through his work. There is no bad faith in a calling, for one obtains selfrealization through the goals of one’s work.
94
Pence, Gregory. “Towards a Theory of Work.” Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader, edited by Kory Schaff, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 93-106.
The above three concepts are explicitly meant to be partially moral concepts. Callings are better than workmanship, and workmanship is better than labor. At bottom, the basic sortal terms about work in a systematic theory must be partially moral concepts. We must have a way to judge that one kind of work is better than another and to guide national planning about what kinds of work should be created. The basic moral assumption behind this conceptual classification is that work is better in direct proportion to the degree in which the following are realized: (1) development and exercise of unique personal qualities, (2) intrinsic satisfaction in the activity, (3) personal choice in accepting the job in the first place. The basic political assumption is that the more people work in workmanship and callings, the more they will be tied to the larger community for the social good (we will discuss this assumption in detail in the last section). We can put these points in another way by saying that a rational person with normal desires would want to avoid the evil of labor in his life-plans and would want ideally to live a calling in his work.
It should be stressed that social stereotypes of callings, workmanship, and labor are not equivalent to their definitions in this paper. If a physician regards his job as boring, repetitious and without intrinsic satisfaction, then he is laboring. In contrast, a gardener might regard his work as a calling, despite the fact that outsiders would see his work as labor. Thus, the important perspective is the view of the worker. One man’s labor is another’s calling.
I have stressed that the conditions differentiating callings from workmanship, and workmanship from labor, must be taken from the point of view of the worker. By understanding these kinds of work in this way, we will get more insights about other aspects of work. For example, an important aspect to understand is the worker’s relation to time. In labor, the temporal parameters of work are imposed by external necessity. In the factory, the eight-hour shift is imposed as a condition of working. The farmer must harvest his crop within the deadlines set by the seasons of his crop. Thus, little choice exists about when labor is done. In contrast, workmanship involves more flexibility about time. One reason why the medieval guilds hated factory work was the elimination of such time-flexibility. The guildsmen traditionally used Mondays (and sometimes Tuesdays) to recover from carousing on the weekend. Yet contracts had to be met, and like modern newspapermen, they would work continuously through the thirty hours before the
95
Pence, Gregory. “Towards a Theory of Work.” Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader, edited by Kory Schaff, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 93-106.
Friday deadline. The important point is that guildsmen could have disciplined themselves and worked more regular hours. They simply chose not to do so. Thus they had a more self-chosen and flexible relation to time.
In Husserlian concepts, the internal time-consciousness of the laborer is permeated by the burden of labor. For those who must labor, work symbolizes the necessity of satisfying basic needs or obtaining security. The time during which the laborer toils the next day is not seen by him as a wide womb of possibilities for self-development. It is instead the time during which he must work but during which he would rather be doing other things. During his labor, he watches the clock in anticipation of breaks and the end of the day. Off the job, he does not escape the burden of his internal time-consciousness. Whether the laborer works every day or only when basic needs must be met, his time off the job is not totally free because he knows, on the periphery of his consciousness, that his activities are restricted by the periodic necessity of a return to labor. Thus, his activities off the job may be done more to escape this burden than for their intrinsic enjoyment. When labor controls life, even non-laboring time may be unfree.
A calling comes closest to the classical idea of leisure when judged by its temporal consciousness. In callings, people almost always work more than the standard forty hour week. Nevertheless, the choice of work is dictated not by any external necessity but by a necessity “internal” to the specific goal. It would be ridiculous to have required Einstein to punch a timeclock at Princeton because callings do not have that kind of temporal consciousness. In a calling there is the greatest flexibility in temporal consciousness. One is free either to disengage from work for days or to work night and day for weeks. Thus, the time-consciousness of callings are open-ended and not confined by the artificial constraints of the social world.
In between the extreme differences in temporal consciousness between labor and callings is the temporal consciousness of workmanship. Its temporal consciousness is a mixture and compromise of the two above extremes. Sometimes the workman may lose track of time and work after hours in order to perfect a piece of work which could have been finished adequately but imperfectly hours before. At other times, the part of him which is not totally identified with his work will yearn to do other things and then his relation to time becomes like that of the
96
Pence, Gregory. “Towards a Theory of Work.” Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader, edited by Kory Schaff, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 93-106.
laborer. Put in another way, we may see the temporal consciousness of workmanship as oscillating between the extremes of labor and callings. One good way to understand temporal consciousness is in contrasting attitudes towards the re-awakening of time-consciousness at the beginning of the day. In the life of a calling, one eagerly arises most mornings with anticipation of the day’s activities. At the other extreme, the laborer’s sleep is alarmed into consciousness by the “alarm” clock, which dictates that escape time is over and that labor must be done again to meet basic needs. In workmanship, there will be some days when one awakes with alarm and other days when one awakes with anticipation. On this criterion alone, most workers in developed countries probably live lives of workmanship, regardless of whether their work is seen from “outside” as labor or a calling.
97
Pence, Gregory. “Towards a Theory of Work.” Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader, edited by Kory Schaff, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp. 93-106.
With each Deep Reading piece, it include "Things to Notice" so that you may sharpen your awareness of, in particular, "patterns in the text, including stylistic and thematic repetition" (“5 Tips" 1,2) that demonstrate good writing "moves" and reinforce essential structural/formal elements of Essay Form.
THINGS TO NOTICE in Gregory Pence's “Towards a Theory of Work”
1. Notice how Pence writes a brief introduction, including a thesis. Identify his thesis.
2. Notice how Pence focuses his paragraphs around particular points--a classification system of types of work--that he develops in detail to support his topic sentences.
3. Notice how Pence writes a well-organized piece by frequently using lists, BUT he DOESN'T just leave them as lists--he goes on to provide specific descriptions, examples, and, significantly, explanations.
4. Notice how Pence defines his terms, "labor," "workmanship," and "callings" by isolating them in definition with explanatory examples in his early body paragraphs through page 94; then, starting on page 95, he develops subthemes for deeper discussion/conversation of the categories of work he defined earlier.
5. Notice the extraordinary development Pence provides starting on page 96 about "temporal consciousness." This material--looking ahead--may be very useful to add in Essay 2 assignment later in the term.
6. Finally, notice the "Husserlian concepts" he discusses before moving on to his development of the concept "temporal consciousness" (96). This "Husserlian" section acts as a transitional section that leads to his discussion of "temporal consciousness." I encourage you to be inquisitive and do some light pre-reading/research about Edmund Husserl and phenomenology.
Deep Readings series can help make the most uncomfortable, inexperienced writer into a strong writer!
Deep reading, close reading, and being inquisitive about what you're reading are self-investments: to be inquisitive is to invest in yourself!
Deep Reading: Ronald de Sousa
THINGS TO NOTICE in Ronald de Sousa's Love: A Very Short Introduction
Love: A Very Short Introduction
So what, as the song goes, is this thing called love? I will
not be canvassing all our uses of the word ‘love.’ Any thesaurus
will supply some four dozen common near synonyms. Each has its
own nuance; some are wide apart from one another. Fondness is
not idolatry; liking is not lust; partiality may or may not result from
passion; rapture is more rash by far than a soft spot. More arcane
Greek words are used to distinguish some importantly different
kinds of love. Three of them imply no sexual desire. Philia evokes
close friendship. Storge (pronounced store-gay) connotes caring in
the sense of taking care of, implying concern for the beloved’s
interests and welfare, such as we might feel for close friends or
family. But storge is not incompatible with sexual desire, unlike
agape, sometimes rendered as ‘charity,’ which is a sort of
indiscriminate, universalized, and sexless storge.
The virtues of agape are described in one of Paul’s Epistles
to the Corinthians: ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy,
it
2
De Sousa, Ronald. Love: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2015.
does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not
self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs
… It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always
perseveres.’ These are qualities one might hope to find in any
desirable human relationship. But for that very reason agape lacks
two obvious features of love as commonly understood.
First, love is all about singling out one (or at most a few)
persons as irreplaceably special. Those we love play a role in our
life that the mass of humanity cannot. Yet agape asks us to favour
all our neighbours, to the exclusion of none. Second, the injunction
to love one another implies that one could do so at will. But loving
(or ceasing to love) is not something we can just decide to do.
A fourth Greek word, eros, best picks out the topic of this
book. Eros is typically associated with intense sexual attraction. It
is eros, not agape or storge, or even philia, that has inspired a
greater number of poems, music, works of art—and crimes—than
any other human condition. For eros in its most extreme,
obsessive, anxious, and passionate romantic form, I shall borrow
the term limerence, coined by the American psychologist Dorothy
Tennov. Despite the unfamiliarity of that word in ordinary speech,
there are good reasons for reserving a special term for what George
Bernard Shaw called ‘that most violent, most insane, most delusive,
and most transient of passions.’ For although it is far
from being the whole of erotic love, limerence hogs most of love’s press.
Contrary to what is often assumed, love is not an emotion.
To be sure, the thought of love is likely to conjure up delicious and
tender feelings. Those loving feelings are indeed emotions, but
they are far from being the only emotions that constitute erotic
love. Depending on circumstances—depending on where you are,
in just what love story—love might be manifested in sorrow, fear,
guilt, regret, bitterness, gloom, contempt, humiliation, elation,
dejection, anxiety, jealousy, disgust, or murderous rage. Rather,
think of love as a condition that shapes and governs thoughts,
3
De Sousa, Ronald. Love: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2015.
desires, emotions, and behaviours around the focal person who is
the ‘beloved.’ Like a kind of prism, it affects all sorts of
experiences—even ones that don’t directly involve the beloved. I
will call that a syndrome: not a kind of feeling, but an intricate
pattern of potential thoughts, behaviours, and emotions that tend to
‘run together.’ And if it also evokes a disturbance that might call
for medical attention, that connotation is not always inappropriate.
A person in love, especially if they are limerent, is often said to be crazy with love.
4
1. In this excerpt from a book, de Sousa presents both definitions and a system to classify types of love in the Western tradition, and he concludes by narrowing the focus toward one particular love type on which his book will focus: "A fourth Greek word, eros, best picks out the topic of this book" (3).
2. Notice that de Sousa provides background information over his first two paragraphs: first, he establishes that love means many different things; then, he narrows to some "classical" love types in the ancient Greek tradition to add focus to his discussion, going from love being "many things and not other things" to just three or four things. Take note of the order in which he does this: he ends with agape in order to expand on it as the topic for his second paragraph (2-3).
3. His second, third, and fourth paragraphs are transitional in order to set up a strong contrast with the last love type, eros, which is the focus of his book. Simply-stated, he contrasts agape with eros (2-3).
4. The last paragraph on page 3 is where de Sousa initiates his argument: "Contrary to what is often assumed, love is not an emotion" (3). Notice that he makes his argument argumentative by starting the sentence with "contrary." However, this statement is not a thesis. Instead, this statement signals a turn toward the thesis only after he explains exactly what he means when he claims "love is not an emotion."
5. Notice that it takes de Sousa quite a few sentences to express his thesis about what love is: "I will call ... [love] a syndrome: not a kind of feeling, but an intricate pattern of potential thoughts, behaviours, and emotions that tend to ‘run together’" (4).
6. Consider reasons why de Sousa takes so long to present his thesis. What kind of effect(s) does his delay cause for you as a reader? What "Moves That Matter in Academic Writing" (Graff et al.) does he use? Refer to Graff et al.'s Chapters 4 and 6, in particular, to help you notice de Sousa's 'moves.'