Critical Reading Strategies

Re-active reading – In re-active reading, the focus is on your immediate response or reaction to the text.  Most of us do this automatically.  Discussions of reading that focus on whether you liked a piece or how it made you feel reflect the practice of re-active reading.
Annotation – Annotation involves taking note of your responses as you read.  Especially for longer pieces, but even in short texts, a series of thoughts, feelings, and questions flow through our minds as we read.  Annotation is simply the practice of writing these down.  Annotation creates a record of our responses to a text.
Explication – Explication involves writing a summary of what a text says. You might describe this as summarizing a text’s literal meaning or the story it tells.  Explication focuses on the content of a text.
Formal analysis – In formal analysis, you describe the organization of a text.  Formal analysis considers the order of a text, its perspective, the relationship between its parts, and its use of literary conventions like rhyme, meter, flashbacks, etc.  You can complete a formal analysis without using literary terms, but the terms provide a useful shorthand to make this kind of reading easier.
Stylistic analysis – Writers create a sort of voice in their work, and stylistic analysis aims to describe a writer’s voice and to identify the techniques s/he uses to create that voice.  
Reflective reading – Reflective reading turns the focus back to you as a reader and raises questions about why you responded to the text in certain ways.  Now the goal is to try to figure out why you respond in certain ways.  How are your responses shaped by the content, organization, and style of a text?   How are your responses shaped by who you are – by your life experience, your beliefs and values, and what you know?  
Questioning – In your annotation, you may have noted questions about specific parts of a text, but it’s also helpful to raise broader questions about a text.  By this point in the reading process, you’ve probably figured out most of the story and noted some of the text’s significant features, and now you might want to start asking why and how questions.  For example, you might ask why an author chose to leave out certain information, or how the narrator’s point of view shapes the story.  Questioning provides a focus for further analysis. 
Contextual analysis – Contextual analysis considers how a text reflects the time and place when it was created.  To put a text into its context, it’s helpful to begin by thinking about the author and his/her relationship to society, as well as social issues of the day, literary trends, what other writers and artists were saying, and so on. 
Intertextual analysis – Literature is sort of a like a conversation among writers and their society, and one way to gain understanding of an individual text is to compare and connect it with others.  How does this text approach a common theme?  How does this writer use a literary technique?  What do several texts together tell us about a particular issue or problem?