The beginning of this chapter begins with the question “What’s the authors argument”. This is a hard question to answer especially because I have experienced being asked that in English class. The text says that after a class was asked this question and struggled, it was usually just answered with a summary of the text. The line “thinking of writing as the art of entering conversations” stood out to me. After being asked a question by changing the format of the question, it changes approaches in reading or answering it when finding out what the authors argument is, instead of thinking of the argument of a text as isolated. This would provoke other arguments. The move from reading for the authors argument in isolation v.s. how the authors argument is in a conversation helps readers become more active. I thought that reading for the conversation was interesting. Figuring out what views the author is responding to or what the the authors argument is was intriguing. There is a challenge when reading for the conversation though, it is that sometimes writers build their arguments by responding to a lack of discussion. This grabbed my attention because I know how difficult it is to figure out views the writers are responding to because it lacks identification. A good example from the chapter is in a passage from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity by Butler. The passage is fairly easy to stumble over and is difficult academic reading. She shares that perspectives show confusion of views by her word choice. Readers feel intimidated before even finishing the passage and I related to this because I thought the same way. It turns out that if you break down the passage into essential parts, it turns into a lucid piece that conforms classic They Say I Say pattern. Basically reading for the conversation means looking not just for the thesis, but views that motivate the thesis. Also, this chapter taught me that I must be alert for strategies writers use to engage the reader. The final piece of information that stood out to me was the “need to be armed with various strategies for detecting a conversation in a reading.”
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