The close reading practice I did help me a lot this week. When I was doing this homework, I followed the reading instruction showing on the webpage and tried my best to understood the meaning of each step. I chose the reading order that is most suitable for me. I know how to do the annotation correctly, which increase the efficiency of reading. The course objective requires us to “develop habits for engaged reading”.
In my opinion, I believe that predicting the main idea, make a connection, and writing a brief summary are essential for achieving this goal. Firstly, I predicted the main idea of the essay by using the heading and title. The title of Looking into the Magic Mirror: Disney’s Impact on the Fairy Tale Genre can give some information about the essay. I could guess from this title that this essay might discuss the effect of Disney on the fairy tale genre, and it might discuss the history of Disney fairy tales. By predicting the content of the article, I can roughly have a direction about the central point and start reading the essay based on this direction. After that, making connection is a crucial step for me to understand this paper on a deeper level. If I want to find the point in which I can make a connection with my idea, I must understand the meaning of the text excerpts. In addition, when making connection, because I bring my ideas into the essay, I could remember some of the more critical conclusions and content proposed by the author. For example, I made a connection with my idea on this text excerpt - “Still, with each new release during the 1990s, “Disney’s influence” became “an almost inescapable part of growing up” (Jackson 1996) as its role transformed from reflecting to projecting social values for their young audience.” The reason is that I can clearly notice this characteristic of Disney works in real life. It makes me remember the moment that I was watching Coco. “death is not the end of a person, they leave, but we can still remember them,” this is a dialogue that influences me in this movie and pushes me to rethink death. So, it convinces me that “Disney’s influence” becomes “an almost inescapable part of growing up”. This increased my confidence in reading accuracy.
Hi Alan! I really liked how you chose of the strategies you learned through the assignment and thoroughly explained the importance of each in the context of how you personally used the techniques. I totally agree that predicting, making connections, and summarizing important techniques to becoming an engage reader. Using these techniques combined reinforce the lesson of thoroughly reading and understanding a text from beginning to end.