Emma ~Reading Article Reflection~ April 16, 2015 by Sarah Speranza

            After reading the article, Performative Literacy: The Habits of Mind of Highly Literate Readers, I had to reevaluate my reading habits in my everyday life. I believe the trait of a performative reader that most applies to my reading strategy is the “tolerance for failure-willingness to re-read and re-read again” (20). In the past with our other books, if I did not understand a page, paragraph, or even chapter, I would feel the need to re-read it in order to understand. I read much more carefully for subjects like English than subjects like Chemistry because the text tends to be too factual and my brain drifts away. However, focused attention is something I struggle with in any subject because I “fail to give close, sustained attention to the text” (19). This bad habit makes me a weak reader, but I usually end up going back and re-reading. I think the most interesting and helpful strategy from this article is to treat reading like writing with the “same false starts, same vision and revision, drafting and redrafting” (21). Another good strategy is to be more active in reading. I need to think more about what I am reading, decide how I feel about the text, and be willing to change my mind. Annotating and taking notes was more difficult than last year because the teachers would give us a list on what we should be annotating for, but this year I have to determine what the most important topics in the book are. It was certainly a challenge at first, but I believe it made me a better reader in the long run because I am now better at my ability to pick out the most important lines from a text.