Remember your favorite Thanksgiving dinner. You sat down to the table with your family and maybe some friends as well. The air was full of the smells of good food: the aromas of turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, corn, gravy, cornbread, cranberries, and more. You took a serving of each and savored the tastes, every one of them. When you were done, you decided there was still room for a few more favorites. This feast only comes once a year, after all. So you took some more dark meat, some stuffing, and a serving of sweet potatoes. These were so exceedingly good the first time around you just had to taste them again to imprint those tastes in your brain. The rest of the food, good as it was, could wait for another day.
Think of understanding an argumentative text, especially a difficult or long one, like that Thanksgiving dinner.
One way to better understand an argumentative text is to read it completely through a second time (or a third or fourth time). In all likelihood, there will be arguments or points made that you missed on the first reading and that you will catch on the second go round. There will be facts or data that you will only remember if you read the text a second time. And your second reading may give you a better idea of the consequences or possible courses of action that flow from the author’s position. For all of these reasons, I’d be the last person to discourage you from reading an important argumentative text more than once. Many academics do this with the works that are important to their area of specialization. To take one random example, I had a philosophy professor in college who reportedly read the complete works of Aristotle each year.
But reading a difficult or long argumentative text from beginning to end multiple times may be, figuratively speaking, biting off more than you can chew or need to chew. Your time is limited and your purpose in reading the text may not require a complete second (or third) complete reading. In those circumstances, you may be better served by adopting the Thanksgiving dinner strategy: don’t go for the whole meal again after the first round; be selective on your second and subsequent readings.
In Reading Argumentative Texts (see especially the concluding paragraphs of chapters 2 and 6) we discussed several tools that will assist you to better understand an argumentative text. These include outlining, summarizing, taking notes, underlining and highlighting, writing comments in the margins of the text, and always asking the next question of the text. So, you have the elements of the Thanksgiving dinner strategy: when you are done reading the text the first time, go back and focus only on the passages you underlined or highlighted, your notes on the text, your comments in the margins, and so on. Think through these passages and comments. What do they tell you? Is the author confused or unclear, or is it you? Did you misread this paragraph when you made this comment in the margin? If so, what does your new understanding of it tell you about the rest of the text? Did the author accomplish what he set out to accomplish in this text? Does his argument commit any logical error? Is his position as found on this page consistent with his comments on that page? And so on.
In answering these questions, you likely will jump around the text, and not progress paragraph-by-paragraph beginning to end. You control which passages you select and in what order you reread and rethink them to extract the meaning of the text. Just like choosing and eating your second serving of only those few favorite Thanksgiving foods.
Reading Argumentative Texts 