Reference no: EM133552256

Problem

Suppose you decided to discuss on the topic of hunger among the homeless in U.S. society. There are a wide variety of sources you could consult; write a list of those sources you might choose. For instance, you could read a personal account of one man's homeless experience in the book A Lady In Red. You could collect statistics on the degree and extent of homelessness in the United States using online sources. The newspapers and tabloids also contain a wide variety of information.

Some of these sources make sensational claims and report implausible events, while others report factual information in a clear and straightforward manner. How can you know which stories report factual information and which offer opinions and misleading information? How would you know which sources are trustworthy and could be used as sources when doing work?

This chapter will teach you a number of critical-thinking skills that are important for both reading and writing, including making inferences, evaluating evidence, and analyzing tone. In this chapter, you will also explore the theme of living outside of the mainstream of society by reading a professional work and a student work about homelessness. To compose an effective work, a writer works with a number of elements that are remarkably similar from one medium to the other. Both stories and pictures contain information presented by a writer who has a particular point of view and arranges the work in several dimensional space. The information is likely to be open to multiple interpretations, which may or may not be justified by the text. Although the sharing of personal opinions and beliefs have value, the focus here is on interpreting or analyzing texts in combination with your personal experiences.

Both words and pictures convey information, but each does so in different ways that require interpretation. Interpretation is the sense a person makes of a piece of communication textual, oral, or visual. It includes personal experience, the context in which the communication is made, and other rhetorical elements. As a scholar, you have internalized strategies to help you critically understand a variety of written texts or images.

Images present a different set of challenges for critical readers. For example, in a photograph or drawing, information is presented simultaneously, so viewers can start or stop anywhere they like. Because visual information is presented in this way, its general meaning may be apparent at a glance, while more nuanced or complicated meanings may take longer to figure out and likely will vary from one viewer to another.