SQR #4david munoz, sebastian salinas

Sebastian Salinas Treviño, David Muñoz.ENG 1320/1301.161
Instructor: Trang Phan
Date: 13/09/2010

SQR#4

Christina Hass and Linda Flowers. Rhetorical Strategies and The Construction of Meaning, College compostion and communication, Vol.39, No. (may,1988), pp. 167-183.

Summary:

Rhetorical reading strategies and the construction of meaning.

The meaning is the most important thing in a text. A meaning is something that is not in the paper and you cant read it, but is the thing that you understand of a text. The people understands the text in different way but the author has a purpose and it is the real meaning of that. If the author wrote in the text that he loves his best friend, I can understand that he is in love with she, but the real meaning could be that he loves she in a way of just friends; a reader can imagine something that he reads and can figure it with images or other things like that. If the author wrote that he has a black dog and that it is the biggest dog he know we can imagine a dog who is very big.

There are three strategies for constructing the meaning of the text (content strategies, feature strategies and rhetorical strategies)  and we can identify them with practice and the only way to do that is by reading.

The content strategies are the strategies are the strategies that the reader ask himself “what is the text about?” and things like that.

The feature strategies are the strategies that the reader makes a point in the text like “this must be the introduction”.

The rhetorical strategies are the strategies that take a step beyond the text like “I don’t think that he needs to do that”.

Most of the students use the content strategies, but we can learn with practice to use the rhetorical strategies too.

Question:

How can these strategies help us in our reading skills?

Response:

It is easy, these strategies will help us because we will focus more in the text and with that we will understand it more. It is better if you know how to use a rhetorical strategy than a content strategy because the rhetorical strategy take a step beyond, it is like you are doing the history, you are thinking like the author, and when you think like him, you can get better conclusions.

We need to improve our reading skills, and we can do it only reading. We need to practice a lot, the average people is the one that do not get anything better that the others. We need to be better that them to get better things, in our case scholarships, jobs, financial aid, etc. when we use the help of the reading skills, we can get better conclusions too, it is better because like in our case, someone is qualifying the conclusions of us, and we will get a better score if we use these strategies than if we do not use them. We want to understand more the meaning of a text, and we can do it only with these strategies, they will help us too to have more knowledge than before, for example:  Our knowledge in biology will be better if we study using these strategies, than if we not use them and we will get a better score and maybe we will be better doctors. It is our decision, we can do in the easy way and just read a lot and don’t get a point on that, or we can do it in the hard way using these strategies and be better in all.