You may have learned the SQ3R method in junior high or high school. “SQ3R” stands for survey, question, read, recite, review. In most versions of this method, it encourages students to understand a chapter of a textbook by (1) surveying the principal headings and subheadings, maps, charts, and figures of the chapter, and reading the introduction and conclusion of the chapter, (2) asking questions about those headings, subheadings, and so on, (3) reading the chapter, (4) reviewing it, and (5) reciting what you have learned.
You may be asking yourself how my discussion of outlining, summarizing, and determining the point of an argumentative text in Chapter 6 of Reading Argumentative Texts differs from the SQ3R method.
The principal difference is that SQ3R is a method for understanding a chapter of a textbook. Textbooks typically are expository works – that is, they present or expose a subject matter to you and do not take sides on disputed questions, if there are any such questions (you would not expect to find disputed questions in an elementary algebra textbook, for example). My focus in Reading, as you will recall, is on analyzing arguments and texts that make arguments, not expository works. And my focus is not limited to any particular type of book. We examine arguments wherever they may be found (in a history book, a speech, a scholarly essay, an article on the editorial pages of a newspaper, and so on).
Textbooks often do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, work that you have to do for yourself in analyzing and understanding an argumentative work. The headings and subheadings of a textbook are often the outline of the chapter or something very close to it. Textbooks have questions at the end of the chapters, which force you to focus on particular passages or charts in a chapter in order to understand the chapter; you will not find that in argumentative texts. We need not belabor the differences.
Apart from these few differences and some others you can discern, both the point of the SQ3R method and Chapter 6 of Reading is to give you tools to better understand what you are reading. If you have not yet learned the SQ3R method, I encourage you to jump online and read a few of the articles and discussions of it. You may find a few pointers that you will want to use alongside the tools discussed in Chapter 6 to make understanding of what you read easier or more efficient. Doing the sort of broad surveying of a textbook chapter, which is the first step in the SQ3R method, may help considerably in your outlining of a longer argumentative work, for example. In any event, it could not hurt.
If comparing the SQ3R method to the strategies and tools offered in Reading helps you to understand more of what you read, then by all means make those comparisons. If modifying the SQ3R method to make it more easily applicable to argumentative texts helps you to better understand those texts, it’s all upside and no downside. That’s a real bargain in the game of life.
Reading Argumentative Texts 