HLTD50H3: AIDS and its Legacies

Engaging with academic texts and writing can be particularly challenging. Reading these materials requires careful consideration and the development of critical thinking skills. 

In this context, critical reading provides a foundation and strategies that emphasizes reading for a purpose:

• Reading to make connections,
• Reading to develop ways of thinking, and
• Reading to create new knowledge.

You will be encouraged to not only connect the readings with your personal experiences and existing knowledge, but also work to incorporate what you are reading into a framework for thinking about the intellectual lineage that it is engaging with. You are being asked to think not only about what the text means, but also how it knows what it means. 

The provided resources in this guide are meant to help make visible the implicit "moves" a skilled reader makes when working to extract meaning from a complex text. This is important because it will demonstrate the ways that you can expose and develop your own meaning-making strategies to practice critical reading on your own. 

Read Actively 

As you read, you are having a conversation with the text.

Don’t wait for the author to spell everything out for you. Instead, think to yourself:

• The author’s central argument is...
• How does the author know that?

Read the Material 3 Times

1. Overview (10-20% of time spent on reading)

Read quickly, scanning for high information content.

This could be reading sub-titles, purpose or thesis statements (usually found at the end of chapters or paragraphs - but not always), methods and conclusions. 

2. Read for understanding (60-80% of time spent on reading)

Once you have a general idea of the material, you can read more carefully to gain a critical, thoughtful understanding of the key points. 

Tip: think about what you have read in light of previous readings or class discussions. 

Focus especially on the beginnings and ends of chapters or introduction and concluding sections of an article.

This is often—but not always—where the author will summarize arguments. Look for these sentences or paragraphs that summarize the main points and then go back and read again to make sure you understood those points.

Tip: a good indication of understanding material is when you are able to explain it in your own words. Practice this aloud to yourself, with a friend or classmate. 

3. Read for note taking & summaries

Look over the reading a third time as you make brief notes about the arguments, evidence, theory, and conclusions. Some tips for note taking are:

• Include just enough detail to let you remember the most important things
• Use a system that lets you find places in the source (eg. identifying page numbers)
• Consider using a citation management software such as Zotero or EndNote to annotate and take notes, so that your notes and citation information will always remain together. 

• PDF - Taking Notes from Readings

Enhance your understanding

It may be beneficial to investigate the broader scholarly conversations happening on the topic in which this reading fits. 

Who does the author cite? With whom is the author arguing? If something seems very relevant and important for your understanding, it would be a good idea to read those related materials. 

Tip: look for other authors who cite this article or book, this is called Citation Mining. 

Please find a resource here on how to find this information on LibrarySearch. 

Think critically and deeply about your reading

You will have time to think and discuss these readings critically in your lectures and tutorials. Some tips for doing and preparing for this are:

• To think about the reading in relation to other readings
• To think about why the argument(s) of this text is/are important to the broader field? 
• What does it help readers to understand? 

Below is a table outlining some characteristics of moving beyond basic comprehension into critically engaging with a text.

This table was developed by Jennifer Duncan from The Writing Centre, University of Toronto Scarborough.  Available here: https://www.stetson.edu/other/writing-program/media/CRITICAL%20READING.pdf 

Whenever you read a scholarly book or article, you always want to look for and carefully consider these elements:

• What is the specific research question? What does the author want to know about their topic?
• What is the answer to the research question? What is the main idea or claim that the author wants to convince their reader of?
• What arguments and evidence does the author provide to support their thesis?
• What are the key terms that are central to the main points of the text?
• Why is the argument important to the field? What can it help readers to understand? How can it help you write your examination essays?

Rempel, H. G., & Hamelers, R. (Eds.). (2023). Teaching critical reading skills : strategies for academic librarians. Volume 1, Reading in disciplines and for specific populations. Association of College and Research Libraries.

Rempel, H. G., & Hamelers, R. (Eds.). (2023). Teaching critical reading skills : strategies for academic librarians. Volume 2, Reading for evaluation, beyond scholarly texts, and in the world. Association of College and Research Libraries.