1. Reading Strategies Workshop
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2. • An inference is a logical solution or
outcome developed by examining
evidence for patterns.
• The evidence comes from the author’s
words, sentences, and paragraphs.
How do we make them?

3. • Are figured out by being good social
detectives….
• http://www.philtulga.com/Riddles.html

4. 1. Activate prior knowledge– it will influence what we infer
2. List the topic, main idea, and supporting details– they define what we are allowed to infer
3. Identify and explain the purpose– it guides what we infer
4. Beware bias and generalizations– yours and the author’s!
5. Check out the tone by looking at
a. Denotations and connotations
b. Subjectivity and objectivity
c. Positivity and negativity
d. Literal and figurative language (similes/metaphors/personification, hyperbole/irony)

5. • A good inference will account for all
known facts or details.
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6. • You should be able to discard some
inferences when the author provides new
information.

7. • Prior knowledge is often required to
understand jokes, riddles or comedy
sketches.
• For example, can you answer this
children’s riddle?
How do you keep an
elephant from charging?

8. Take away his credit cards.
•To “get” the joke, you need prior
knowledge about charge cards and wild
elephants; and that it’s silly for an elephant
to have a charge card.
•Your prior knowledge is what makes the
joke funny. If you don’t have the
knowledge, you don’t get the joke.

9. • In groups of two, think of classroom-appropriate
jokes and determine what
prior knowledge a person has to have to
“get it.”
• More sophisticated jokes, like comedy
sketches on Saturday Night Live or The
Daily Show, often depend on detailed
prior knowledge.

10. • Prior knowledge is good for more than
jokes. It also helps you understand a
reading.
• Prior knowledge plays a crucial role in
drawing inferences.

11. • Sometimes your prior knowledge,
especially beliefs, might conflict with
information the author is presenting.
• You’ll need to suspend your belief for a
while and concentrate on the author’s
ideas.

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The inferences that you build must be
based on the evidence presented in the
reading – not on your beliefs.

13. In other words, even if your
author demonstrates a
bias…implied or not…to
fully understand the reading,
you must leave your own bias
“at the door.”
(sad, but true, the author cares not what you
think…)

14. • A generalization is a type of inference.
• A generalization is a statement that
encompasses all examples, types, or other
details the author presents.

15. • Sometimes the author doesn’t directly
state the main idea – instead you have to
infer the main idea.
• Use annotations and/or an outline to mark
the topic, list the details, then infer what
the main idea must be.

16. Search for the topic
Find the major supporting details
Look for patterns among the
details
Generalize from details
Combine generalizations with
topic to derive the implied thesis
statement

17. • P = Persuasive
• I = Informative
• E = Expressive

19. 1. Read the title and subheadings.
2. Consider the source and the
genre.
3. Notice the author’s tone.

20. Inferring is much like
predicting….
And often the clue to solving
the mystery comes from
tone…

21. • Denotation: Think “d”, dictionary. The
literal meaning of the word.
• Connotation: Think “conn”, connections.
The association of the word to emotions
or attitudes.

22. • Connotations suggest subjective tone.
• Subjective means the author is placing
himself/herself into the writing as one of
the subjects.
• A lack of connotation suggests the reading
is objective or factual.
• Objective means the author is ignoring
opinions and focusing on the object of the
writing – the facts or ideas.

23. • Connotations can be positive or negative.
• Knowing the polarity of the connotations
can help you understand the author’s
tone.

24. • An adjective’s job is to state the
characteristics of a person, place, thing, or
idea.
• Adjectives can show the degree of
intensity with which the author describes
ideas and events.

26. • Working in groups of two, list three to five
adjectives of increasing intensity for each
of the items on the next slide.
• For example, if the slide said “cleanliness
of a room” you could answer “disgusting –
dusty – clean – sparkling – sanitized.”

28. Are connotations
Are connotations
present?
present?
yes no
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Are connotations
positive or negative?
Are connotations
positive or negative?
How intense are
connotations?
How intense are
connotations?
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29. • In order to talk in class about an author’s
ideas, you need to use words that describe
the author’s tone more specifically.
• A few examples are on the next slide..

30. Negative Neutral Positive
alarmed balanced amused
angry denotative appreciative
annoyed factual blessed
apathetic impartial celebratory
bitter informative cheerful
cynical just elated
desperate matter-of-fact excited

31. • Figurative language – including similes,
metaphors, personifications, and
hyperbole – has a subjective tone.
• Literal language, which often appears in
the form of facts, has an objective tone.

32. Are connotations or figurative
Are connotations or figurative
language present?
language present?
yes no
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Are connotations
positive or negative?
Are connotations
positive or negative?
How intense are
connotations?
How intense are
connotations?
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What type of figurative
language is being used?
What type of figurative
language is being used?

33. • Simile: An indirect comparison of two
things using the words “like” or “as.”
• Metaphor: A direct comparison of two
things without using the words “like” or
“as.”

34. Me without a mic is like a beat without a snare . . . I'm
sweet like licorice, dangerous like syphilis.
-- Lauryn Hill, “How Many Mics”
Like a flower
Waiting to bloom
Like a lightbulb
In a dark room
I'm just sitting here waiting for you…
-- Norah Jones

35. Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
-- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major
I look at you and wham, I'm head over heels.
I guess that love is a banana peel.
-- Bud Weisman and Fred Wise,
“I Slipped I Stumbled, I Fell”

36. • Personification is the act of giving an
inanimate object characteristics of an
animate being.

37. Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes
and lets its hair down. Pink is the boudoir color, the
cherubic color, the color of Heaven's gates. . . . Pink is
as laid back as beige, but while beige is dull and bland,
pink is laid back with attitude.
-- Tom Robbins, "The Eight-Story Kiss." Wild Ducks Flying
Backward.
There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas.
-- Rush, “The Trees”

38. • Hyperbole is intentional exaggeration to
make or emphasize a point. Hyperbole is
meant to be taken figuratively, not
literally.

39. • She sent so many text messages, her
thumbs fell off.
• He watched so much television that
you could see “Lost” reruns when you
looked into his eyes.
• Hyperbole is, without a doubt, the
single greatest writing tool in the
history of the universe.

40. • Irony is the use of words or images to
express the opposite of what is said.

41. 1. Verbal irony: The words used have an
unexpected meaning.
2. Situational irony: What happens is
unexpected or is the opposite of our
expectations.
3. Dramatic irony: The audience or reader
knows more about what is going on that
the character does.

42. • Create
– Two similes for daylight
– Two metaphors for love
– Two statements containing hyperbole dealing
with school
– Two ironic statements about the economy

43. General Purpose General Tone
Inform Objective
Express Subjective
Persuade Subjective

44. Subjective
• To express or persuade.
• Usually several
connotations and/or
figurative language.
• Author creates
emotional states.
• Caution: Subjective
writing may still include
facts and information!
Objective
• To inform.
• Few connotations with
fewer degrees of
intensity.
• Author help readers
understand with their
minds.

45. Let’s Practice!
• “Hal and Me…”

46. Let’s Practice!
1. “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you
stop?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the
implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and
weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having
nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the
malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly
disconnecting the memory circuits that control its
artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says,
forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

47. Let’s Practice!
2. I can feel it too. Over the last few years I’ve had an
uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been
tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry,
reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going---so far as I
can tell but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to
think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it
easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My
mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the
turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through
long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now
my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get
fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to
do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to
the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has
become a struggle.

48. Let’s Practice!
3.I think I know what’s going on. For well over a decade now, I’ve
been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and
sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The
Web’s been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once
required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can
now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick
clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or the pithy
quote I was after. I couldn’t begin to tally the hours or the
gallons of gasoline the Net has saved me. I do most of my
banking and lots of my shopping online. I use my browser to pay
my bills, schedule my appointments, book flights and hotel
rooms, renew my driver’s license, send invitations and greeting
cards. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be
foraging in the Web’s data thickets---reading and writing e-mails,
scanning headlines and blog posts, following Facebook updates,
watching video streams, downloading music, or just tripping
lightly from link to link to link.

49. Let’s Practice!
• 4. The Net has become my all-purpose medium, the
conduit for most of the information that flows through my
eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having
immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily
searched store of data are many, and they’ve been widely
described and duly applauded. “Google,” says Heather
Pringle, a writer with Archaeology magazine, “is an
astonishing boon to humanity, gathering up and
concentrating information and ideas that were once
scattered so broadly around the world that hardly anyone
could profit from them.” Observes Wired’s Clive Thompson,
“The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous
boon to thinking.”

50. Let’s Practice!
5.The boons are real. But they come at a price. As
McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels
of information. They supply the stuff of thought,
but they also shape the process of thought. And
what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away
my capacity for concentration and
contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my
mind now expects to take in information the
way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving
stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in
the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like
a guy on a Jet Ski.

51. 1. Activate prior knowledge– it will influence what we infer
2. List the topic, main idea, and supporting details– they define what we are allowed to infer
3. Identify and explain the purpose– it guides what we infer
4. Beware bias and generalizations– yours and the author’s!
5. Check out the tone by looking at
a. Denotations and connotations
b. Subjectivity and objectivity
c. Positivity and negativity
d. Literal and figurative language (similes/metaphors/personification/hyperbole/irony)