On Reading

Extractive reading is probably the most familiar kind of reading you have done in school, even if you have never heard it called by this name. Its purpose is straightforward: to faithfully record what a text says, argues, or is about in some abbreviated form that you can take away with you and return to later. It is reading in the service of understanding and retention.

In this mode, you move through a text carefully, working to identify central claims, key terms, and the evidence the text uses in support of its conclusions. Your tools are summary, selective quotation, and paraphrase. You might write a condensed version of the argument in your own words. You might construct an outline that maps the text’s logical architecture—how it sets up a problem, develops its analysis, and arrives at its claims and conclusions. You might copy out several quotes that seem central to the text’s meaning or purpose. The goal in every case is the same: to produce a reduced but faithful representation of the original, one that captures what matters most without distortion.

This sort of reading is extremely important; and it is a lot harder than it sounds. You can’t re-present something you don’t actually understand, and understanding is often very difficult. This sort of reading has other challenges too: a good summary requires that you distinguish between what is central and what is peripheral; it requires that you resist the temptation to substitute your own ideas for the author’s, or to skip ahead to evaluation before you have fully understood what is being said; it asks you to be, for a time, a disciplined and even self-effacing reader—one who subordinates personal reaction in favor of accurate comprehension.

Extractive reading asks a deceptively simple question: “What does this text actually say?” The emphasis falls on “actually,” because in practice we are often far less accurate readers than we imagine ourselves to be. We skim, we project, we remember the parts that confirmed what we already believed and forget the rest. In these moments when we distort the text we produce what are called “situated readings.” The discipline of extractive reading, however, pushes back against these tendencies by requiring that you slow down and produce a written record—notes, summaries, quotations—that can be checked against the source. This is an act of intellectual honesty and fidelity: you are not yet agreeing or disagreeing, praising or criticizing. You are making sure you understand what you are dealing with before you do any of those things.

Think of extractive reading as building a reliable schematic of a text. A schematic is not the machine itself—it leaves things out, it simplifies, it reduces—but a good schematic tells you how the parts relate to each other and how the whole thing holds together, how it works. And like a schematic, your notes and summaries become something you can spread out on a table and study, return to months later, hand to someone else, mark up and revise as your understanding deepens. You will need this schematic later, when you begin to evaluate the text’s claims or when something in the text sends you off on a line of flight to some other thing. You cannot argue with a text you have misunderstood, and you cannot be genuinely surprised by something you never really read in the first place. Extractive reading is the foundation on which the other modes of reading depend.

A useful tool for extractive reading is annotation.

If extractive reading asks “What does this text say?” then critical reading asks “What do I think about it—and why?” This form of reading may be thought of as dialogue, as confrontation, as intellectual engagement between your mind and another’s. Where extractive reading asks you to set aside your own reactions in order to understand, critical reading invites those reactions back in and asks you to take them seriously—to examine them, develop them, and put them into words and reasons.

Critical reading means engaging the reasoning, arguments, and consequences of a text on your own terms. It means asking whether the author’s claims hold up under scrutiny. Are the arguments logical? Is the evidence sufficient, relevant, and fairly presented? Are there assumptions operating beneath the surface that the author has not acknowledged or examined? Are there counterexamples the author has overlooked, or alternative explanations that would account for the same evidence? What are the consequences of the author’s position—if we accept this argument, what else must we accept, and are we prepared to do so?

This may take the form of criticism. You might identify a gap in the author’s reasoning, a contradiction between two claims, a place where the evidence does not support the conclusion. If you are writing about a novel or film, you might explore how the text seems to mean something it doesn’t explicitly say—perhaps it has a feminist message or is a subtle critique of a particular social class. But critical reading is not merely negative. It may also take the form of praise—an appreciation of a particularly elegant argument, a recognition that the author has seen something that others have missed, or a realization that the text has changed your mind about something you thought you understood. In either case, what matters is that you offer reasons drawn directly from the text itself. Critical reading is not about liking or disliking, agreeing or disagreeing. It is about thinking—publicly, carefully, and accountably—about what meaning you see in the text.

This is where your own mind becomes the primary instrument of inquiry. In extractive reading, you defer to the text; in critical or close reading, you assert yourself against it, alongside it, in tension with it. You are no longer asking what the author thinks. You are asking what you think yourself, in light of what the author has put before you. This requires a certain courage, because it means publicly committing to a position and defending it, knowing that your reasoning is now as open to scrutiny as the author’s. But it also requires humility, because the best critical readers are the ones who have done the hard work of extractive reading first—who have genuinely understood the text before presuming to judge it.

Think of critical reading as a conversation with a text in which you are finally allowed to talk back. But like any good conversation, it only works if you have been a good and generous listener first. The quality of your criticism or praise will be directly proportional to the quality of your attention. A shallow reading produces shallow critique; a careful, honest, extractive reading of a text—one that has genuinely grappled with what the author is trying to say and why—produces the kind of critical response that is worth hearing: one that teaches us something not just about the text, but about the world the text is trying to describe.

A useful tool for critical / close reading is critical notes.

As you read, stay alert for anything that seems curious, unfamiliar, or unexpected—even when it sits at the margins of the text’s purpose. When something catches your attention (an unfamiliar concept, an offhand reference, a gesture to history or biography, a questionable statement of fact, anything you find curious or interesting) set the text aside and then do something about it.

Where it takes you is genuinely open. A departure might lead to the library, to track down some obscure reference. It might mean looking up an unfamiliar word and then trying to use it that week in a sentence. It might lead to another text, another author, another question. It might prompt you to do something. You might hear an author describe a place and feel compelled to visit it, or find it on a map, or look up photographs of it. You might encounter a description of a process—how glass is blown, how a river is dredged—and decide to go watch someone actually do it. A passage about food or a craft or music might send you into a kitchen, a workshop, or down a rabbit hole of recordings. The point is not that every departure must terminate in a book or a database. The point is that something in the text opened a door, and you walked through it.

This mode of reading asks you to adopt a completely different attitude and posture toward the text—a far more subjective, personal, and creative one. In these moments, you are not trying to get to the bottom of what the author means. You are instead allowing the text to do something to you—to set off a chain of association, curiosity, or wonder that carries you somewhere the author perhaps never intended. I also considered the French word détournement for this approach to reading because it suggests a “hijacking,” “misuse,” or “misappropriation” of the text. While the extractive reader dutifully asks “What does this text mean?”, in a departure reading the reader asks, “What does this text make possible?” or “Where can I take this?” One reader seeks fidelity to the source; the other treats the source as a provocation, a spark, a portal. If “close reading” names the careful, disciplined work of drawing nearer to what a text says in a critical mood, a departure reading names the free, ungovernable work of letting a text fling you outward—beholden to no one’s agenda but your own. Both are legitimate ways of reading, but we rarely practice the second one in school, which means we rarely develop the capacities it cultivates—capacities like curiosity, lateral thinking, intellectual risk-taking, and the willingness to get productively lost.

In a departure reading, you hijack the text; the value lies not in mastering the content, but in discovering questions or problems that interest us personally. Reading becomes less the “digging down” or “drawing close” of close reading than it is a taking of flight off to someplace unfamiliar and far away. This is not a careless or lazy way of reading. In fact, it requires a peculiar kind of attention—not the attention of the dutiful student scanning for what will be on the test, but the attention of someone alive to surprise and their own experience. It means reading with enough openness that a footnote, a passing metaphor, or an unexplained remark can become the most important thing on the page—not because the author put it there for that purpose, but because when your mind encountered it something ignited. The text is the occasion, but you are the event.

Departure reading prepares you to perform research. All research begins like this—not with a thesis or a topic, but in a recognition of ignorance. Something strikes us as curious or cryptic, and rather than merely passing over it, as we often do, we pause and consider it. This momentary hesitation is the origin of all inquiry. It marks the shift from passive reception to active pursuit. To research means to go looking or hunting for something—to follow a trail out of the text and into the library, the archive, the field. I hope that these small research assignments will help us learn to draw out these pauses rather than skip over them, hopefully developing a research habit or reflex in the process.

If you later think this bit of knowledge will be helpful or interesting to others, read or describe your entry during our class discussion of the text. In many cases, your efforts will serve to deepen our collective understanding of the text, since it will provide additional context for our reading. However, it may also be the case that your inquiry travels far, far away from the text to pursue some idiosyncratic and personal interest others might not fully appreciate or even understand. But you should follow the freak wherever it takes you.

A useful tool for departure reading is field notes.