Reflective Summary And Interpreting AP Lit

Everybody has their own methods for writing; however, I believe there is always room for improvement. Chapter 3 in Everyone’s an Author has shown me that writing involves processes that need to be mastered through constant practice. It also revealed helpful tips on how to develop writing processes that can help write effective papers.

One of the first things that this author would do is to teach students how to make connections while reading. When students make personal connections with what they are reading by using their prior knowledge, it helps them to retain information. There are three main types of connections we make while reading text; we can make connections to what we are reading and our own experiences in life, we can make connections from one book to another (like reading a Nancy Drew book and reading a Trixie Belden book), and we can make connections to what we are reading and things that are going on in the world around us. By helping Jose learn to make connections while he reads, Jose will be able to more readily remember what he has read and make sense of it (Comprehension Strategies, n.d.).

What goes through your mind when you read? Do you read deliberately, looking for certain aspects, or do you read as a blank slate? When reading, professors expect a deliberateness that will help you to uncover meanings that are not readily apparent. Thomas C. Foster in his book “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” expands on this concept. He endeavors to instruct his readers in the way he believes they should read, in order to get the most out of each book. He concedes that, “When lay readers encounter a fictive text, they focus, as they should, on the story and the characters” but to truly read like a professor you must also divert a portion of your attention on

Handbook is a useful resource which provides ways to effectively read texts. For example, analyzing can be used to break a book down into smaller parts to further help the reader. Evaluating, on the other hand, allows many things to be considered that will assist the reader in better understanding the text. Formulating is a method used at the end of reading which can help with the conclusion and provide details about the text. According to The Little

Understanding great works of literature can be fairly difficult without the knowledge of analyzing them. How

Mike Bunn in “How to Read Like a Writer” begins with a revelation: that writing is a process in which individual words are specifically chosen and strung together in a way that impacts the reader. With this in mind, Bunn encourages his students to read like a writer. Reading like a writer is different from just appreciating the message. Bunn compares reading like a writer to an architect studying a constructed building. The goal of reading, then, is for students to examine how a piece was constructed with the purpose of recreating a similar effect in their own writing. Bunn establishes the fact that students are made to read so they can learn to write before showing students how to go about this. Before reading, the context should be evaluated, he

Foster, Thomas C. How To Read Literature Like a Professor. New York: Quill, 2003. Print.

Choose passages that speak to you. Consider the parts of the book that made you stop and reflect on what was read. Consider what you may highlight or annotate. Consider the text that may lead to thematic, character, or literary convention analysis. Make connections to the text (text-text, text-self, and text–world). Analyze the style of the text—reflect on elements like symbols, imagery, metaphors, point of view, etc. Apply the different literary critical approaches with which you are familiar.

In Christina Haas and Linda Flower’s article “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning”, they point out, and break down, the three reading strategies that are used by students when reading a passage, or paper. An experiment was constructed to show what each of these strategies are like while being used and what the reader may ask, or get out of, a certain excerpt.

How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C Foster is a how to do book that teaches children how to become better readers. The novel was written in second person. The purpose of this novel is to inform readers on details that they wouldn’t usually realize in literature. Students who read Thomas C Foster’s How to Read Literature like a Professor are suppose to gain knowledge of how to identify details of their story that have connections to other literature or have alternative meanings that the author is trying to get across to the reader. Thomas C Foster believes reading his novel can help develop you into a better reader. He believes this because the information that he includes can apply to your reading. When you

Looking back at the amount of writing I’ve done for AP Literature, I can see growth in my understanding of poetry and of literature. There are skills and concepts that I need to focus on and refine as I continue on through the class, but I am confident in the abilities that I have picked up so far.

In "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning," Christina Haas and Linda Flowers suggest that readers have issues using rhetorical reading strategies and must be instructed to find rhetoric in text in order to do so. Haas and Flowers reference a study where several students ranging from freshmen to undergrads were asked to read an article and describe the authors intentions at several points throughout the article. Haas and Flowers noted that younger, less experienced students had a harder time connecting points and surmised the text; where older and more experienced students connected each point of the article, and gave their interpretations of the text.

or pattern. –‘’When small children, very small children, begin to tell you a story, they put in every detail and every word they recall, with no sense that some features are more important than others. As they grow, they begin to display a greater sense of the plots of their stories – what elements actually

How do professors read? Do they read like average people, like students, like an adult? The daunting question, only answered by Thomas C. Foster through his book, How to Read Literature like a Professor. This novel is an informational text and each one of the chapters discusses a method in writing that will help readers to better comprehend literature. Readers learn from the novel about all sorts of different methods and devices that they can use to locate and interpret connections and ideas that are normally surpassed when reading. This novel teaches readers to look between the lines and open up a whole new world of understanding.

Throughout the semester of TE 348, I was able to read many books of various genres, themes, messages and characters. Due to the variety of text I read, I used a range of lenses when engaging with the text in my responses. This has shown me how I tend to react to a text, and what lenses I don’t use as often. Also, I am able to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages that come with engaging with the text with certain lenses. All of this has led to my development of engaging with literature.