Of all the topics discussed in this past Thursday’s class that we discussed, the most helpful had to be the format of how to quick read a longer text. With this technique, we discovered simple and efficient tips to get through a text with a barebone understanding on the overall passage or book.

The first question one must ask is: who is writing? Or in other words, one must figure out the reason or motivation of the author for writing the passage. It also helps determine any form of bias within the piece. The next question to ask is: what is the text about? This is fairly simple to determine because the answer is typically embedded within the title or the first few sentences. Another useful question to answer is: what are the main claims of the text? Figuring this out could easily pinpoint what the author may be trying to depict, and the main claims are usually within the first few sentences of a lot of the body paragraphs.

Of all the questions to ask, the above are part of the most important questions. Others may include: what’s the conclusion? What are the questions you have about the text? What’s the evidence for these claims? Although these are obviously important to ask, it’s often more relevant to ask the questions in the previous paragraph because it gives a more basic answer to the question, while these other questions’ answers will be unorganized without answering the first set of questions.

Therefore, text analysis can be very useful in a quick read of a passage.