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- Reading (Paper 1):
- COMPREHENSION Interrogate the text
Think of critical reading as a bit like an autopsy: you have a piece of text laid out in front of you and you need to dissect it. To do that, you need to learn what tools there are, how to use them, and when to select the right one. These reading tools are going to help you to better interrogate the texts you’re given in the exam.
The 4 tools are:
- Question
- Clarify
- Evidence
- Infer
- Question
The first tool to use is your
Question
tool – this is to get to the
basics
of what you’re dealing with.
As you start reading the text, find out what is going on by asking yourself: who, what, where, when and why.
So who are the people, what are they doing, where are they, when is this happening, and why – why is it happening to them and why is it important.
So if you’re struggling to even understand what on earth is going on in the text, before you even get to all the writer’s techniques, just use the Question tool to ask those basic questions.
- Clarify
Try to
clarify
any gaps you might have because there might be some difficult words you’ve just never seen before. Perhaps the text is taken from a broadsheet so it has some sophisticated language, or there might be some jargon because it’s on quite a bizarre or niche subject.
You’ll need to try and clear up any confusion you have about the text, especially if a word is in a key sentence. The best way to solve that is to:
- Break the word down to its root; strip it of any prefix or suffix (any letters before or after it).For example, if you hadn’t come across the words ‘abnormal’ or ‘normalise’ before, you can clarify their meaning by cutting off the prefix of suffix.
Normal | Abnormal | Normalise
- Look at the words around it and check that the root word you have makes sense in the context of whatever else is written.
- And if it doesn’t make sense, then cover it up and fill in the blank! Think of a word that could go in its place.
For example:
“She was a multifaceted woman with many talents.”
If you don’t know what ‘multifaceted’ means, cut it to it’s root. What letters before or after the main word can we cut? We have ‘multi’, which we know means ‘many’ (as in, multiple or multiplex). The word ‘many’ is also in the sentence so that goes in our favour; we’re then able to infer that it means the woman has lots of different sides to her. So we could replace that word ‘multifaceted’ with the word ‘interesting’ or something similar, to see if it makes sense. And it does.
“He had a powerful and malignant presence.”
What does malignant mean? What prefix or suffix can we cut to get to the root? We might get to ‘mal’ as in, bad. The words around it don’t help much either – because powerful can be a good or bad trait. But at least we’re now 50/50 as to whether it’s a good thing. But the fact we have a hunch that ‘mal’ means ‘bad’, that helps tips in favour of ‘malignant’ meaning something negative, particularly if we’re aware of the word having other associations (i.e. cancer, a malignant tumour), so we’re fairly sure then that a ‘malignant presence’ must be a negative thing. So to double-check, let’s replace it with the word ‘’unpleasant’ and see if that fits in with other descriptions of him in the text, which it does.
Exam Tip
Be aware that the exam board will have deliberately chosen texts that include difficult words that you’re likely to not understand! That might seem cruel, but it’s to test whether you have this skill to clarify meaning and to problem solve any confusion you get from reading a text.
- Evidence
This next tool is fairly self-explanatory! You just need to look around the text for
evidence
. The exam will ask you to identify certain words or phrases that suggest a particular meaning. You’ll need to examine the text and sift through it to find the
explicit
meaning the question is looking for.
- Infer
Your Infer tool is where you make some
informed inferences
– or interpretations – about the text, based on any clues, signs, hints, or any patterns you come across.
If this was an autopsy or an x ray you’d be looking for fractures or bruises or marks on the body – anything that gives you subtle hints.
But in language you’re looking for moods and emotive
language and semantic fields, and connotations. This helps you to read between the lines and get to the implied meaning, or the intention of the writer, by looking at their techniques and style. It’s also how you can pick up on any bias in the text.
- COMPREHENSION: Summarize the text
Summarise
This is where you need to give a concise but cohesive overview of the text.
Use your Critical Reading Tools to chop up the text, digest it and pick out its key points. Now you need to rewrite it as a summary, using your own words.
Exam Tip
You’re given a wordcount of just 120 words for this question – so it’s a very short summary.
Try to practice writing 120 word summaries of your favourite books or films, so that you become good at communicating the key, salient points.
Use Your Own Words
It’s important you use your
own words
in your summary, and not to repeat key words or phrases from the text.
The best way to avoid that is to go to the thesaurus you keep in your brain and find a synonym of the word.
So if the text says “She was thrilled with the outcome”, run that key word “thrilled” through your internal thesaurus and find words like “pleased”, “delighted”, “overjoyed” etc.
For example:
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This one is tricky – because we have to find a synonym for ‘friends’, ‘enemies’, ‘remember‘ and ‘silence‘ – almost the whole quote! But reworded looks like this:
“When our allies stand by and say nothing, that stays with us longer than the memory of whatever our adversaries had to say.”
It’s much less elegant than the original quote! But at least the meaning is still there and we’ve used our own words. But it’s longer than the original quote – which is fine when it’s such a short quote, but sometimes you’ll need to condense a passage.
This is where you need to learn to paraphrase. For example:
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”– Leonardo da Vinci
A paraphrased version colud be:
“Successful people are proactive – they go out and make a difference, rather than wait around.”
Practice paraphrasing by finding some long quotes and rewriting them so they’re shorter and in your own words.
Exam Tip
Only summarise the facts and information in the text.
Don’t try to embellish it or add any extra details that aren’t there. You’re not being asked you opinion or to reflect and comment on the content, ONLY to summarise.
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