Reading Critically: The Summary

The key things to look at before you begin reading an essay are the title, background information about the author, where the work was originally published (to find the audience) and when it was first published.  While reading, it is helpful to keep a pencil handy so as to be able to annotate the piece. After reading, it often helps to summarize the contents of the essay, so that you can see its shorter form, its barest elements. After all of that is done you need to analyze the essay, which is a multi-step process in which you first analyze it by separating it into its parts, then make inferences about the work based on what you already know, synthesizing it all, or putting it all back together, and for some works the last step may be evaluation, in which you make a judgement on the quality of the work. To help you with this, you can pay attention to the writing strategies used by the writer, as well as the language or tone that the essay has, which tells a lot about who they are aiming the work at, as well as affected how effective the piece is as a whole.