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69
A.
1. What is the subject area of the article (judging by the title)?
2. What information or knowledge do you already have about the subject (before you have read the article)?
3. What is your purpose in reading this article? Have you been given any guidelines for reading this article?
If so, what are they.
4. What are the writer's basic assumptions, his hypothesis (or hypotheses), and his main thesis?
5. What historical or other background material does the writer provide?
6. What is the writer's plan or method of organization? Does any one type of text structure dominate this
article? i.e.:
a. Does the writer define a word or concept?
b. Does the writer compare/contrast two ideas?
c. Does the writer describe a historical event — causes leading up to the event, results of the event or both?
d. Does the writer analyze a situation or event, providing us at the outset with a generalization and following
this up by supporting evidence (deductive organization)?
e. Does the writer begin with the details and end with a generalization (inductive organization)?
f. Does the writer first present the arguments of other writers, only to refute them, and then finally, present
his own viewpoint on the subject? (e.g., consider Towards a Humanistic Medicine and The Outsiders in Part
IV.)
g. Does the writer use some combination of the above rhetorical text structures and organizing patterns to
develop his argument?
7. What is/was the writer's purpose in writing this article?
8. What kind of writing characterizes this article (expressive? informational? a combination of both? Which
one of them dominating?)*
* See Types of Discourse, Unit 1 of Section IV (Part II).
9. What questions or problems are discussed?
10. What other researchers who support his point of view does he mention?
11. What points of view other than his own does the writer present?
12. What evidence or data does the writer present to support his ideas?
13. What definitions (of special terminology, or terms he uses in a special way) are presented by the writer?
14. What examples does he bring in to illustrate each of his ideas?
15. What reservations or qualifications are made by the writer? Is he making a strong or weak claim for each
of the points in the thesis?
16. Is he convincing? Why (or why not)?
17. Determine if, and where, the writer makes use of such rhetorical devices as: (a) irony; (b) humor; (c)
appeal to the emotions; (d) analogy; (e) figures of speech (metaphors, similes); (f) repetition for purposes of
stressing important points; rhetorical questions.
18. Summarize the main points of this article in 2-3 paragraphs.
19. What difficulties did you have in reading this text? (Vocabulary? Sentence structure? Following the
writer's argument? Missing background information?)
20. How closely does this article fit in with the lectures andcourse work for which you are reading it?
Hints on Answering Objective Test Questions About a Text