The Second Beam By Joan Ackerman Summary

Reading and writing should be seen as interactive subjects rather than just reading or writing words on paper in ink. John Beans suggests that individuals should look at both reading and writing as conversations. In his article “Reading and Writing as Conversations” Bean states by envisioning yourself having a conversation with the author, referenced individuals, and characters, readers are more likely to better understand the text. Texts are seen as different conversations each text has a connection to another text. Such as if you were referencing a particular article,book,or quote in your text. Many people have a reason for reading different types of text. Some reasons could simply be because the individual wants to, needs to, discover new

One crucial formalist element the author incorporates is the use of point of view. The way the story is told allows the reader to have an exceptional grasp on the meaning. The story’s layout follows the second-person point of view, which gives the opportunity for the author to address the readers directly, rather than just illustrating her own experiences with culture. Throughout the story, Ng redundantly uses the word “you” instead of “I”, for instance when she mentions, “Take pleasure in the surprise on people’s faces when you say, ‘My name is Mackenzie Altman’” (931). The main reason the author chose to peruse a second-person point of view is that she wanted the reader to be able to connect with the story on a personal level.

The ability to recall the parts of a story and determine the main idea of a reading passage is the basis for skills such as inferencing, sequencing, and overall comprehension of what has been read. Based on this knowledge, this author would address Jose’s ability to recall main story elements and therefore understand the main idea of the reading passage first.

Why do pre-reading strategies that activate prior knowledge and raise interest in the subject prepare students to approach text reading in a critical frame of mind?

Schools often require reading materials containing unfamiliar subjects to students. Recognizing that there is significance for critical understanding of the text itself as well as the act of reading, this explains why many students today struggle with reading material that is not relevant to their lifestyle. Freire portrays that by the statement, "reading the world precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world" (Freire 286). A person should read their world, and then interpret it. They can then use their existential experience of the world to connect to what they are reading in print, and better understand it.

How do memory, symbol, and pattern affect the reading of literature? How does the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature? Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern.

-As readers we come across many details in literature that hole significance, however the common reader usually misses the deeper

Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning and begin to evaluate texts by drawing on a growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features

* How do memory, symbol, and pattern affect the reading of literature? How does the recognition of patterns make it easier to read complicated literature? Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern.

In Christina Haas and Linda Flower’s article “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning”, they present three different strategies readers use when reading a paper or an article, and the importance of each. An experiment was constructed to show those strategies in action, and what each type of reader does while using the strategies.

Indeed, reading starts with an initial idea spawned by the author, but it is the reader’s responsibility to interpret, ponder, and absorb this idea in a beautiful and meaningful way. For example, a quote from one book could be lackluster to one reader and have little to no effect on them; however that same quote can move another reader to tears.

Understanding memory, symbol, and pattern allows the human mind to understand literature on a much deeper level for many reasons. Instead of reading just reading literature on the surface level, the deeper meaning and the author’s purpose for the piece can begin to be understood. These three things help break up the monotony in a lengthy piece of literature, allowing the reader to focus on the plot and not get lost in the insignificant details. More importantly, understanding these techniques will definitely improve the reader’s ability to relate literature to other books and allow them make predictions on the outcome of the plot much earlier. All in all, literature becomes more rewarding when the reader understands the author’s

As printed text becomes more difficult to read, reading as a hobby has gotten a lot less attractive to some people. UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield points out in her studies, “reading develops imagination, induction,

Reader-response theory identifies the reader as an affective agent who imparts real exist-ence and life to the work, completing its meaning through interpretation. Reader- response criti-cism argues that literature should be viewed as art in which each reader creates his or her own-most likely unique, text-related performance. I am using Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish’s takes on Reader Response for my study.

Fish’s Reader Response Criticism is composed of two interdependent ideas: first, that the meaning of texts is shaped by the reading experience itself, and second, that these meanings cannot be judged to be correct or incorrect, but merely belonging to one “interpretive community” or another. The first idea may be identified as the executive aspect of Reader Response Criticism because it analyzes the act of reading, while the second idea is the epistemological aspect of the theory because it circumscribes the knowledge we can acquire about a text to the merely relative. Studied independently, each aspect of Reader Response Theory offers by itself strong arguments countervailing the formalist stance of the New Critics. But as we will see,