Process Work for the CRRA: Playing With Words – Practicing Critical Reading
Let’s practice! Here’s an excerpt from Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk:
“It’s the randomness that makes your head this way, living the Russian-roulette life-style every minute of the day. Mortars falling out of the sky, random. Rockets, lob bombs. IEDs, all random. Once on OP Billy was pulling night watch and felt a sick little pop just off the bridge of his nose, which was, he realized as he tumbled backward, the snap of a bullet breaking the sound barrier as it passed. Inches. Not even that. Fractions, atoms, and it was all this random, whether you stopped at the piss tube this minute or the next, or skipped seconds at chow, or were curled to the left in your bunk instead of right, or where you lined up in column, that was a big one (Fountain 53).
Now follow steps 1-5 and answer the following questions. Please number the questions. Unless stated, most questions can be answered in a sentence or two. This is process work, so I expect the work to be messy, not polished.
1) The Simple Steps to Active Reading (AGWR, page 38): Please answer the following:
a) First, read the passage aloud, which forces you to concentrate on the text.
b) Read the passage again (to yourself). Make notes of thoughts you have as you are reading. What did you think as you read the passage? Write one sentence about your thoughts.
c) In one sentence, write down what you think is the main idea of the above passage.
2) How to figure out what’s happening (AGWR, page 42): Please answer the following:
a) Who is speaking? To whom? What is the point of view? Write 1-2 sentences.
b) What is the situation in the passage? Write one sentence.
c) What’s happening in the passage? Write one sentence.
d) What happened immediately before this part of the text? What happens next or following the passage? (This is context…you must always consider the context of a passage when analyzing it.)
3) How is the text creating meaning? (AGWR, page 47): Please answer the following:
a) What is the tone? How can you tell? (1-2 sentences)
b) How would you characterize or describe the type of language Fountain uses? (1-2 sentences)
c) Identify markers or elements of style/storytelling (e.g., Literary devices or techniques such as metaphor, allusions, etc.). Name 1-3 literary devices or techniques that the rhetor utilizes in the passage. Click here for the definitions of the elements of style/storytelling.
4) How to perform a Close Reading of a passage: Please answer the following:
a) In the passage I have excerpted above, circle or underline the words that you feel hold the weight of the passage, which signal the passage’s meaning(s). That is, mark the words you do not understand and look them up. Circle, underline, color-code, bracket, and make lists; do whatever you need to do to dissect what is going on in the passage.
b) Write the words that hold the weight of the passage on a separate piece of paper.
c) Go back to the passage. What did you leave out? Circle or underline at least five more words, and copy those as well on to the sheet of paper.
d) Now group these words according to a principle of organization that you find useful. It can be as simple as nouns, adjectives, and verbs, or you can group by similarity and dissimilarity. You might name your word groups (emotion words, words related to time or measurement, military terms, clichés, etc.) You can also group the words in more than one way. For example, you could go back to the question where you identified the elements of style, and group the words by the style technique that they represent. And for the CRRA essay, you might group the words based on which genre convention they may represent.
e) Next to each word, jot down all the definitions you can think of for these words.
f) Then, also consider the connotations of words and phrases.
g) Write a paragraph that interprets the passage based on these groupings and definitions. Think rhetorically—why did the author choose those particular words? How are they supposed to impact an audience?
h) Using the OED, available to you through the University Library web page, look up each one of your words and write down the definitions you find there. Compare to your own definitions. Based on this new layer of research, you can now reorganize your groupings, or, if satisfied, keep them the same.
5) Why is the author making these choices? (AGWR, page 51) Please answer the following:
a) What does the author want the reader to understand, believe, or feel by the end (of this passage)? How can you tell? This is the passage’s primary message.
b) What kind of evidence does the author use to support his or her position? Anecdotes? Scientific data? Imaginary examples? Figurative language?
c) What does the kind of evidence tell us about the intended audience? What does the author assume the audience already knows (what information does he leave out)? What does s/he assume they still need to understand (what information does s/he deliver?)
d) What do tone, language, and style tell us about the intended audience of the piece?
e) How does the writer construct his or her ethos for the audience?
f) How does the language of the passage bring the author’s message or purpose into focus?
g) How might this passage represent a convention of the war novel? Or has the rhetor utilized a language technique that is a convention of satire?
h) END PRODUCT: Based on the insight and analysis you’ve completed on steps 1-5, revise the paragraph that you wrote in answer to 4g. Try to formulate a claim or over-arching argument regarding your observations. In other words, formulate an assertion. This might be the topic sentence of your analytical paragraph.
NOTE: The above is the process that you’ll want to practice as you analyze passages and quotes for the CRR assignment. You will want to perform this kind of close reading prior to writing a thesis statement for the CRRA.