Q&R: 3

Q&R 3: After reading about skills needed for revising a group member’s piece, would you consider yourself a reader who can “draw inferences, make predictions, [and/or] construct meaning in a text”?

I consider myself a reader who, first of all, follows rhetorical strategies in every piece that she reads through. I start by reading the text fully and marking the mistakes the writer made (such as grammatical, and use of words) and, primordially, the sentence structure, which is most important for the reader to understand. After going through the piece, I go back and comment on the few errors in it and advise the writer of the details it needs or how to develop certain sentences to make their audience understand.
I would mostly be the type of person that makes many predictions of a writer’s piece because I focus based on what they are trying to say and how they try to approach their audience to predict things deep into the text, such as, why they wrote the piece or for what kind of audience their essay was written. Predicting what is “between the lines” requires the capability of understanding the text (usually, I rely on rhetorical strategies to help me read beyond the essay when applying to making predictions) to a certain extent, which is salient that it is the author who needs to be understood.
Also, drawing inferences is another easy form of criticism for me because I infer what the text is saying, especially when in a group because I learn from other people’s opinions as they draw their own inferences from the same piece.
If I try constructing the meaning to a text, there is a high chance that I do not know what type of meaning I am looking for or I may have misinterpreted the piece, which usually happens to inexperienced readers. There is a difficult process to constructing meaning in an essay because I, as a peer, have to understand the piece well enough to summarize it all. Therefore, such a reading skill is not my strength.
I may lack certain “high order reading skills,” yet I now keep in mind that I should start practicing my reading and know how to criticize “specifically” and analyze an essay better by having more group discussions since they boost our confidence and expand our vocabulary. Therefore, after reading Neubert’s and McNelis’, and Gillam’s articles, I realized that I mostly applied to inferring what an essay says and predicting things deep into the author’s intentions.