CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - How to Read Hard Texts in CIE (0 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:

To develop a repeatable strategy for reading difficult texts
To budget reading time honestly across different genres
To build the commonplace book and personal glossary as working tools
To know where to find support and why the course is designed the way it is

Background Reading and References

Please refer to the following readings and examples offering templates to help get you started:

The Assignment

Every text on this syllabus was written for readers who did not yet exist — including you. Nobody arrives at college already knowing how to read Plato, Alter’s Genesis, or Victorian scientific prose; those are skills this course exists to build, and this page is designed so that students with every kind of reading background, pace, and format preference can build them. Use it before each new text, not just the first one.

The Three-Pass Strategy

Hard texts are not read once; they are read in passes, and each pass has a different job.

Pass one: survey (10-15 minutes). Before reading a word closely, flip through the whole assignment. Read the first and last paragraphs, the section breaks, any headings or footnotes, and the first sentence of a handful of paragraphs. Your goal is a map, not comprehension: what kind of text is this, how long is it really, and where does it seem to turn?
Pass two: close read with pencil (the main event). Read the whole assignment with a pencil (or its digital equivalent) in hand. Mark passages that strike you, confuse you, or repeat; write questions in the margins; argue back. A page with no marks on it is a page you have not yet read. This is also where quote-harvesting happens (see below).
Pass three: return to the hardest paragraph (10-15 minutes). After finishing, go back to the single paragraph that resisted you most and read it again slowly — aloud if it helps. Often it unlocks now that you know where the text was going. If it still resists, bring it to class: the hardest paragraph is usually where the best discussion lives.

Reading with the Four A’s

When a text resists you — or when you resist it — a fourth pass with four questions can break the standoff. Mark the text for:

What assumptions does the author hold? Finding what the author takes for granted turns a frustrating text into a legible one, because the parts that seemed arbitrary usually follow from an assumption you had not yet spotted.
What do you agree with in the text? Locating real agreement first keeps resistance from hardening into dismissal, and gives your later disagreement something solid to stand on.
What do you want to argue with? Naming a specific objection to a specific passage converts a vague dislike into a discussable position — the difference between “I didn’t like it” and a seminar contribution.
What parts do you aspire to? Even a text you fight usually contains a sentence you wish you had written, and finding it keeps the reading generous enough to stay accurate.

This is the protocol behind the Four A’s Reading Response (/Participation/FourAs), where it becomes a submittable written response. Source: Gray, J., “Four ‘A’s Text Protocol,” National School Reform Faculty (NSRF), https://www.nsrfharmony.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/FourAsTextProtocol-N.pdf.

Building the Argument: From Reading to Persuading

Reading well is half the course; the other half is turning what you read into arguments. A compact playbook:

A thesis worth having is arguable (a reasonable person who has done the reading could disagree), specific (it names the texts and the relationship it claims between them), provable (it can be supported with quotable passages), and consequential (it answers “so what?”). A sentence everyone would nod at is a summary, not a thesis.
Every piece of evidence needs its warrant. The working unit of an essay paragraph is the chain claim → evidence → warrant: your assertion, the quotation that supports it, and — the step most often skipped — your own 2-3 sentences of reasoning showing why that quote supports that claim (adapted from Toulmin, S., The Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press, 1958).
Acknowledge and concede before you rebut. The strongest essays plant a naysayer: they state the best objection fairly, concede what is genuinely right in it, and only then answer it (Graff, G. and Birkenstein, C., “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, W. W. Norton). An objection stated weakly convinces no one, including you.
Signpost, and summarize others fairly. Tell the reader where the argument is and where it is going, and state views you disagree with in language their holders would recognize as accurate — fair summary is both an ethical habit and a persuasive one.
Know your registers of persuasion. Ethos persuades through the credibility of the writer, earned here by accurate quotation and fair summary; pathos persuades through the reader’s emotions, legitimate but never load-bearing in an academic essay; logos persuades through reasoning and evidence, and it is the primary register of CIE essays.

Each move has a workshop mini-assignment where you practice it before drafting: the Thesis Workshop (/Participation/ThesisWorkshop), the Evidence Workshop (/Participation/EvidenceWorkshop), and Counterargument and Concession (/Participation/Counterargument). After the draft and your Writing Fellow conference, the Draft Reflection: Four A’s on Your Own Draft (/Participation/DraftFourAs) is the post-conference companion that turns the conversation into a revision plan.

Quote-Harvesting for the Commonplace Book

During pass two, harvest as you go: when a sentence stops you, copy it into your commonplace book with its page number and one line about why it stopped you. Do this while reading, not afterward — quotes harvested in the moment come with your reaction attached, and those reactions become writing-prompt responses, essay evidence, and entries in The Machine Question (/Participation/MachineQuestion), the semester-long strand of your commonplace book, with almost no extra work. Aim for three to five harvested quotes per assignment; more is fine.

Honest Time Budgets

Different genres read at radically different speeds, and pretending otherwise is how reading plans fail. These are honest estimates for a careful pass-two reading, per class assignment:

Text type	Our texts	Honest budget	Why
Poetry (fragments and lyric)	Sappho, Islamic mystic poetry	1-1.5 hours for a few pages	Poems are short but dense; each one is read several times, and the white space is part of the text
Epistle / letter	Adichie, Coates	1.5-2.5 hours	Reads quickly but addresses you; the work is in pausing to answer back
Philosophical dialogue	Plato (Allegory, Euthyphro)	2-2.5 hours	Every exchange advances an argument; skimming loses the thread
Scripture with commentary	Genesis (Alter)	2-2.5 hours	You are reading two texts at once: the translation and the footnotes
Scientific prose	Darwin	2.5-3 hours	Victorian sentences and a long argument; the slowest reading on the syllabus
Literary journalism	McPhee	2-2.5 hours	Fast-moving narrative carrying a slow-moving argument
Argumentative nonfiction	Deloria, McLuhan	2-2.5 hours	Bold claims that reward stopping to test them
Fiction / novella	Forster	1.5-2 hours	The story pulls you along; budget time to reread the ending

Budget the hours in your week before the week begins. Two shorter sessions beat one long one for nearly everyone.

Roadmaps for the Three Densest Reads

Coates, Between the World and Me

Expect a book-length letter in sustained second-person address: Coates is writing to his son, and you are reading over the son’s shoulder — the “you” is not you, and noticing that is part of the reading.
Readers commonly stall in the long paragraphs where memory, argument, and grief braid together without section breaks; do not wait for a break that is not coming — set your own stopping points.
When stuck, read aloud. The book’s rhythm is oral, and passages that resist the eye often open to the ear.
Track the recurring words — the body, the Dream, the streets — as if they were characters; they accumulate meaning across the book.
One orienting question: what does Coates insist can only be said about bodies, and never about abstractions?

Genesis, in the Alter Translation

Expect two voices on every page: the translation above and Alter’s footnotes below. Read the footnotes as a second voice in the conversation, not as optional apparatus — they are where the Hebrew’s wordplay, ambiguity, and strangeness come through.
Readers commonly stall by reading the familiar stories on autopilot; Alter’s whole project is to make them unfamiliar again, so slow down precisely where you think you already know what happens.
The doubled creation accounts (Genesis 1 versus 2-3) are a feature, not an error; read them as two texts standing side by side and ask why both were kept.
Genealogies and repetitions have jobs; skim them for pattern rather than skipping them entirely.
One orienting question: where does Alter’s translation differ from the version of the story you carry in your head, and what does the difference change?

Darwin, On the Origin of Species (selections)

Expect Victorian sentences: long, qualified, courteous, and built like arguments in miniature. Read them at sentence speed, not paragraph speed, and reread freely.
Readers commonly stall in the piles of examples (pigeons, barnacles, seeds); track the argument, not the examples — each pile exists to support one claim, so name the claim in the margin and move on.
Darwin anticipates objections constantly; when he raises one, mark it — his handling of counterarguments is a model for your own essays.
Watch his tone: the caution is strategic, and noticing where he hedges tells you where he knows the stakes are highest.
One orienting question: what, exactly, is Darwin most worried his readers will refuse to believe, and how does he try to earn it?

Multiple Formats (UDL)

Where legitimate editions exist, you may supplement your reading with other formats: published audiobook editions (Coates reads his own audiobook, and audio recordings of Darwin and Forster exist in the public domain), and recorded lectures on Plato, Genesis, and Darwin from reputable university sources. These are supplements, clearly marked as such — the CIE Reader and our assigned editions remain the citable text. Listening can carry you through a hard stretch, but page numbers, translation choices, and the footnotes live in the assigned edition, and all quotations in your writing must come from it.

The Glossary Habit

Keep a personal glossary page in your commonplace book. Every text on this syllabus has load-bearing words — eikasia, piety, hesed, natural selection, the Dream, the medium — and hard reads get easier the moment you stop re-deriving what a word means each time you meet it. One line per word: the word, where you met it, and your own working definition (revised when the text proves you wrong).

Where to Get Help

The Center for Writing and Speaking supports reading as well as writing: bring a passage that will not open, a draft that will not start, or a reading schedule that keeps collapsing. Our course Writing Fellow, office hours, and your classmates’ marginalia are all legitimate tools. Asking for help with a hard text is not a workaround; it is how hard texts have always been read.

Why the Course Is Built This Way (A Transparency Note)

Every essay in this course moves through draft → Writing Fellow conference → revision, and that is not busywork: the design assumes that writing is rewritten — that nobody, including your professors and the authors on this syllabus, produces finished thinking in one pass. The scaffolded deadlines exist so that the conference happens when a draft can still change, and so that students arriving with every level of writing experience get the same structured chance to improve. Reading works the same way, which is why this page teaches passes instead of heroics. If the system ever stops making sense for you, say so; the design serves the learning, not the other way around.

Submission

Nothing to submit. This is a support page; return to it before each new text.

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