Which of the four reading purposes did you employ?

Answer 1

Following are four reading purposes, examined briefly. You may have one or more for any "reading event." Purpose 1: Read for understanding. Studying involves reading to comprehend concepts and details. These components depend on each other. Details help explain or support general concepts, and concepts provide a framework for remembering details. Purpose 2: Read to evaluate critically. Critical evaluation involves understanding. It means approaching material with an open mind, examining causes and effects, evaluating ideas, and asking questions that test the writer's argument and assumptions. Critical reading brings a level of understanding that goes beyond basic information recall. Purpose 3: Read for practical application. A third purpose for reading is to gather usable information that you can apply toward a specific goal. When you read a textbook preface or an instruction booklet for a new software package, your goal is to learn how to do or use something. Reading and action usually go hand in hand. Purpose 4: Read for pleasure. Some materials you read for entertainment, such as Sports Illustrated magazine, the latest page-turner by DaVinci Code author Dan Brown, or even novels by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. As Yale professor Harold Bloom points out, reading for pleasure gives you the opportunity to enlarge your life and to enter into "alternate realities." "Why read?" Bloom asks. "Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading [the Thomas Mann masterpiece] The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing."5