Critical Reading
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
Here is an excerpt on being a critical reader. Read it carefully and see how important it is to be a critical reader.
Reading Critically
Of course, everybody knows how to read – in one sense. People read constantly – newspapers, novels, textbooks, Life, printed captions and slogans on televisions, advertising cards on buses. And in general they know what is being said. They can report to someone else the gist of a passage of writing.
But reading is much more than this. Let’s take two examples to show what we mean. First, here is a short speech. Read it once at your normal speed; then read it again, more slowly, pausing to decide just what each sentence says. What are the speaker’s ideas” what are his purposes in communicating them? How plainly and effectively does he present them? Before what sort of audience might the speech be delivered? What does the whole speech add up to?
Mr. Chairman, ladies and Gentlemen:
It is indeed a great and understands privilege to address such an audience as I see before me. At no previous time in the history of human civilization have greater problems confronted and challenged the ingenuity of men’s intelligent then now. Let us look around us. What do we see on the horizon? What forces are at work? Whither are we drifting? Under what mist of clouds does the future stand obscured?
My friends, casting aside the raiment of all human speech, the crucial test for the solution of all these intricate problems to which I have just alluded is the sheer and forceful application of those immutable laws which down the corridor of Time have always guided for his hopes and aspirations. Without these great vital principles we are but puppets responding to which and fancy, failing entirely to grasp the hidden meaning of it all. We must readdress ourselves to these questions which press for answer and solution. The issues cannot be avoided. There they stand. It is upon you, and you and yet upon me, that the yoke of responsibility falls.
What, then, is our duty? Shall we continue to drift? No! With all the emphasis of my being I hurl back the message No! Drifting must stop. We must press onward and upward toward the ultimate goal to which all must aspire.
But I cannot conclude my remarks, dear friends, without touching briefly upon a subject which I know is steeped in your very consciousness. I refer to that spirit which gleams from the eyes of a new-born babe that animates the toiling masses, that sways all the hosts of humanity past and present. Without this energizing principle all commerce, trade and industry are hushed and will perish from this earth as surely as the crimson sunset follows the golden sunshine.
Mark you, I do not seek to unduly alarm or distress the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters gathered before me in this vast assemblage, but I would indeed be recreant to a high resolve which I made as a youth if I did not at this time and in this place, and with the full realizing sense of responsibility which I assume, publicly declare and affirm my dedication and my consecration to the eternal principles and receipts of simple, ordinary, commonplace justice.
If after having carefully read and reread this speech, you haven’t got much out of it, we don’t blame you. It is a blast of hot air. The only positive point the speaker makes is that he is in favor of justice, which is not surprising, since practically everybody is in favor of justice, just as practically everybody is against sin.
But the speech as a whole isn’t about justice. In fact, it isn’t about anything. It opens with a platitude – a statement of the obvious couched in worn-out language. Then it asks a series of questions to which we might reasonably expect to get the answers before the speaker finishes. We never get them. Nor do we ever find out what is meant, by “all these intricate problems,” “those immutable laws,” “these great vital principles,” “these questions which press for answer and solution,” the issues”. “We” (who?) are said to be “drifting,” but we must keep working toward “the ultimate goal” (what?). A “spirit” is mentioned in Para 4; it is also an “energizing principle.” But again – to what does the speaker refer?
The most evident quality of the speech, looked at in this way, is that it is composed of five paragraphs of high-sounding but empty language. The unwary might jump to the conclusion that the speaker is a deep thinker, uttering immortal truths – but that is only because his words are chosen to give that impression. Actually, the speech is like a soap bubble that a child blows. It gives off pretty colors, for the moment, its words (for example, “mist of clouds”, “Faint beacon light,” “that spirit which gleams from the eyes of a new-born babe”, “the crimson sunset”, “the golden sunshine”) pleas us, just because we are accustomed to react in certain ways to such language. But when we prick the bubble with our critical intelligence, its substance proves so frail that it simply vanishes.
Look at the first sentence in para-2. Analyze it logically, word by word. If we take “casting aside the raiment of all human speech” at its face value, we have to assume that the speaker is no longer going to use “human speech”. What, we may ask, does he plan to use instead? What is meant by “the crucial test for the solution of all these intricate problems” to which he says he has “just alluded” (but he hasn’t)? What sort of picture is evoked by the hand of man groping for a beacon light?
We could say much more about this pompous speech. It is filled with trite phrases (“a great and undeserved privilege”, “the corridor of Time”, “the yoke of responsibility”, “onward and upward”, “the toiling oratorical tricks (“dear friends”, “with all the emphasis of my being I hurl back the message No!”). It uses both short sentences (Para-3) and a long one (Para-5) to produce a desired effect upon the audience…
The vital point of what we have done, however, is this. By keeping a few pertinent questions in mind a you read, you can strip away the pretensions of deliberately vague and “impressive” language and discover that, as in the case of this speech, what you are reading is a worthless as a three-dollar bill.
Having seen how critical reading can expose emptiness, if not actual deceit, let us now turn to the passive, constructive use of the same techniques. Here is part of a review of a movie. The reviewer has that the film lasted 114 minutes. Then he goes on:
A hundred and fourteen minutes is damn near two hours. You can fly from here [New York] to Cleveland in a hundred and fourteen minutes. Roger Bannister can turn twenty-eight miles in a hundred and fourteen minutes. In a hundred and fourteen minutes, you can get from here to Forest Hills on the Long Island Rail road. But a hundred and fourteen minutes of “King Richard and the Crusaders” got me exactly nowhere.
What do these five short sentences, written by a talented journalist, accomplish? It takes close, thoughtful reading to get his full massage and appreciate his true intension. He begins with the indisputable statement that 114 minutes is almost two hours. What can be done in 114 minutes? Well, you can fly from New York to Cleveland. Then our writer continues: Roger Bannister (the British athlete who was the first to run a mile in less than four minutes) can spend 114 minutes in running twenty-eight miles. At this point the alert reader does a double take: What was that last statement? A man who can run a mile in less than four minutes can run twenty-eight miles in 114 minutes. Theoretically, yes; actually, no. Bannister would have to be a superman indeed to keep up his record-breaking pace for almost two hours! The reviewer knew very well that his statement was absurd, but the absurdity, as we shall see, was part of his plan. He was suddenly switched from the demonstrably true to the obviously impossible – for a purpose. Next, he says, you can ride from New York to the suburb of Forest Hills, a distance of 8.7 miles, in 114 minutes. The full point of this probably would be appreciated by New Yorkers, for whom the review was primarily intended. The long island rail road for many years has been notorious for its slowness. Its timetable says that the running time between New York’s Penn Station and Forest Hills is sixteen minutes, but the writer, now turning cynical, implies that there is a pretty broad gap between the rail-road’s promise and its actual performance. Furthermore, by saying in effect that in 114 minutes a fast runner could fo 19.3 miles farther than a passenger could go on the Long Island Rail Road, the reviewer has capped his first absurdity (the assumption that a man ca run twenty-eight miles in 114 minutes) with a second (the assumption that he can outrace a train – even a Long Island Train).
Yes, but what has all this to do with the movie? The next sentence makes it clear: “But a hundred and fourteen minutes of ‘King Richard and the Crusader’ got me exactly nowhere. In other words, even the Long Island Rail Road, synonymous with slowness, a road whose trains (it has been humorously implied) travel less than a third as fast as a human being on two legs, moves faster than the picture does.
The reviewer could have said, in so many words, that the film drags, and let it go at that. But then he would not have had his fun, nor would his alert readers have had theirs. What he did was to begin with the idea of high speed (flying to Cleveland, running a four-minute mile) and then suddenly shift into the contrasting idea of slow motion ( the weary railroad) – the two ideas being ingeniously connected by the use of Roger Bannister. The chain of reasoning from sentence to sentence is faulty, but the fallacies were entirely intentional and the readers were expected to recognize them as such. What our critic did, therefore, was to express his essentially serious comment on a movie he didn’t like in subtly humorous terms – to entertain his readers with a bit of mental gymnastics which they could appreciate only if they read his review sentence by sentence, weighing the meaning and implication of each carefully wrought statement.
At this point you are doubtless getting alarmed. “Do you mean to say that I’ll have to read everything as closely – word by word, phrase by phrase, and sentence by sentence – as we’ve read that little quotation from a movie review?” The answer is yes – for the time being. Only by such close and admittedly time-consuming analysis can you hope to develop your critical faculty.
Critical reading involves digging beneath the surface, attempting to find out not only the whole truth about what is being said, but also (and this is, in the long run, more important) the reasons why the writer says what he goes. When a reader finds out not only what is being said, but also why it is said, he is on the way to being a critical reader as well as a comprehending one.
(Adapted from Richard D.Altick’s Preface to Critical Reading)
