Active Readings

Active Readings

Learning Outcome 3 : Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

I read an essay called “Making Conversation and The Primacy of Practice” by Anthony Kwame Appiah and I had to prepare it for discussion. I went through the essay highlighting areas where I had questions, terms that needed extended definitions, and what connections I made with the article. Once I found quotes for each section, I provided an explanation on what my take was on the quote. This process helped me get use to analyzing important texts and other scientific articles. Below, the questions are in yellow, understand are in blue, drawing relationships are in pink, challenge are in green, rhetorical are in orange.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Making Conversation and The Primacy of Practice.” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, 2nd ed., Bedford/St. Martins, 2010, pp. 66–82.

Question for the text (yellow)

  1. On page 68, Is this talks about how people are connected compared to an early age?
  2. On page 68, the last paragraph. What is cosmos paradoxical definition that related to rest of the paragraph?
  3. “There’s is a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge” (pg 70). What is a challenge that Appiah mean?

Understand (blue)

  1. To understand what Appiah’s mean by “cosmopolitanism”, I used page 68, paragraph 1: ” even once we started to build these larger societies…. encourage resistance to tyranny and a concern for the worth of each human life”.
  2. On page 71, paragraph 3, the first sentence.”Remember you are citizens of the world” This quote clearly defines cosmopolitanism.
  3. On page 71, on the paragraph 2: Example is unclear.

Drawing relationship (pink)

  1. Sometime we are doing something as a traditional we have a question about that but we still doing it because our ancestors are doing a long time ago (pg 67)
  2. Remind me of my catholic Experience (pg 69)
  3. Is this connect with the traditional/culture idea that people are doing something without asking question about it? (pg 74)

Challenge (green)

  1. I don’t understand what he is truly mean about the loyalty (pg 71)
  2. I can understand the conflict with value with Appiah’s example of abortion, but how is there harmony when people cannot agree? (pg 78)

Rhetorical (orange)

  1. irrelevent to the rest of the essay (pg 71)
  2. hard to understand what the author’s meaning (pg 71)
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