Question and Response Number 2

How can we as students develop ourselves to find the “cues” in a piece of literature and respond to them more?

The article states that reading involves picking up cues from writing and making our own representations of what we believe to be the more sophisticated purposes of it. This is difficult to do once again because we have not really been taught to do so. How do we as students find the “big picture” in writing?

I think it is a good idea to look into things that have meaning in our lives and try to find the more philosophical reasons for why they are important to us. Maybe if we take time to explore activities in other realms of learning in growing that aren’t conventional to our habits. Maybe if as college students we learn to read philosophical books or take time to interact with people in a way that we don’t usually, we can learn to see how others think and why they do the things that they do.

I believe that this method or reading may also request us to be more psychological with our analysis of writing. How people respond and how in depth one might think of a certain topic might be understood if we understand how people behave. Maybe we should think about who the author is before we try to figure out what they are saying. Better yet we might want to look at who we are while we are reading to see what we think the author might be saying. If we better understand ourselves and the people around we may better understand how people express themselves in writing

We should probably try to learn to express ourselves too, in different ways to see how certain feelings are invoked or expressed. Maybe attempting to be more artistic and pick up expressing ourselves through photography or dance might help students see different point of views. If we can try to step out of our own boxes we can understand more about ourselves and how we feel about things we maybe had never even thought about. If a student is artistic already, maybe they should try something more philanthropic like working with children or different groups of people.

Whatever we try, I think the best way for a student to become a more sophisticated reader is to try to learn how to do things from many different points of view. This way, it will be easier to pick up the “cues” an author gives us in his writing and we will be able to find multiple representations in them. Some of these representations may be our own or some we have learned that come from other people. Either way, we have developed a greater understanding and may be able to analyze all sorts of different text to find the more sophisticated meaning in them.