Haas and Flower Q&R 2

After reading the Haas and Flower article, do you consider yourself to be among the “student readers”?

As a matter of fact, I did realize that I read like the students readers who were mentioned. I tend to paraphrase everything I read and I hardly analyze anything or think outside the box. I think that my previous reading skills have a lot to do with this. I would only use the “content strategies” which are basically just reading on the surface and knowing what the story is about but not really looking more into it. Due to this shallow way of reading the material, I had a hard time in one of my classes this spring. I was taking Intro to Philosophy and in that class we had to read every day. We would then discuss what we read in class with our professor and she would ask us various questions. It was in these questions in which I saw that we really had to understand what we were reading and try to interpret what the author was trying to say and what he meant by this or that. I found it very difficult to do because I would only end up paraphrasing or summarizing what I had read. I didn’t do very well on my first test or essay because I lacked the skills necessary to be able to fully grasp the context of the book. In the Haas and Flower article it talks about the rhetorical strategies that students can use to help them improve in their reading skills. After reading it, I realized that I have a lot more to learn in order for me to be an effective and be able to look beyond the surface of the text and make my own assumptions and opinions regarding what I read. This article encourages students to use the rhetorical strategies to help them become “experienced readers” and not be “student readers”, which rely on “text-based strategies to construct their meanings”(Haas and Flower 168).

Denise