CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - How to Read Hard Texts in CIE

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:

To read a difficult text in several passes instead of one exhausting one
To mark anchor passages while reading, so evidence is ready when you write
To know what to do when a text defeats you on the first attempt

Background Reading and References

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

Center for Writing and Speaking: Reading to Write

The Assignment

How to Read Hard Texts in CIE

Goals

To develop a repeatable strategy for reading difficult texts
To budget your 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

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

The Three-Pass Strategy

You don’t read a hard text once. You read it in passes, and each pass has a different job.

Pass one: survey (10-15 minutes). Before you read 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. You are building a map here, 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 the passages that strike you, confuse you, or repeat. Write questions in the margins and argue back. This is also where quote-harvesting happens (see below).
Pass three: return to the hardest paragraph (10-15 minutes). After you finish, go back to the single paragraph that resisted you most and read it again slowly, aloud if that helps. It’ll often unlock now that you know where the text was going. If it still resists, please bring it to class, because the hardest paragraph is usually where the best discussion lives. You almost certainly aren’t the only one stuck there.

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 an author takes for granted makes a frustrating text legible, because the parts that seemed arbitrary usually follow from an assumption you hadn’t spotted yet.
What do you agree with in the text? Locating real agreement first keeps resistance from hardening into dismissal, and it gives your later disagreement something solid to stand on.
What do you want to argue with? Naming a specific objection to a specific passage turns a vague dislike into a discussable position.
What parts do you aspire to? Even a text you fight usually contains a sentence you wish you had written, and finding it keeps your reading generous enough to stay accurate.

This is the protocol behind the Four A’s Reading Response, 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’ve read into arguments. Here’s 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 (you can support it with quotable passages), and consequential (it answers “so what?”). A sentence everyone would nod at is a summary.
Every piece of evidence needs its warrant. The working unit of an essay paragraph is claim, then evidence, then warrant: your assertion, the quotation that supports it, and your own two or three sentences of reasoning showing why that quote supports that claim. Students skip the warrant most often. (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 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 you state weakly won’t convince anyone, including you.
Signpost, and summarize others fairly. Tell your 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, which you earn here through accurate quotation and fair summary. Pathos persuades through the reader’s emotions, which is legitimate but should never carry the load in an academic essay. Logos persuades through reasoning and evidence, and it is the primary register of CIE essays.

Each of these moves has a workshop mini-assignment where you practice it before drafting: the Thesis Workshop, the Evidence Workshop, and Counterargument and Concession. After your draft and your Writing Fellow conference, the Draft Reflection: Four A’s on Your Own Draft turns that conversation into a revision plan.

Quote-Harvesting for the Commonplace Book

Harvest as you go during pass two. When a sentence stops you, copy it into your commonplace book with its page number and one line about why it stopped you. Please do this while you’re reading and not afterward. Quotes you harvest in the moment come with your reaction attached, and those reactions become writing-prompt responses and essay evidence with almost no extra work. Aim for three to five harvested quotes per assignment, and more is fine.

Time Budgets

Different genres read at radically different speeds, and reading plans usually fail because we pretend they don’t. Here are my estimates for a careful pass-two reading, per class assignment:

Text type	Our texts	Budget	Why
Poetry (fragments and lyric)	Sappho, Islamic mystic poetry	1-1.5 hours for a few pages	Poems are short but dense; you read each one 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, and 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, so budget time to reread the ending

Please budget these 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. Don’t wait for a break that isn’t coming; set your own stopping points.
When you get 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. Please read the footnotes as a second voice in the conversation and 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 exactly where you think you already know what happens.
The doubled creation accounts (Genesis 1 versus 2-3) are deliberate. Read them as two texts standing side by side and ask why both were kept.
Genealogies and repetitions have jobs to do. Skim them for the pattern instead of 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 instead. Each pile exists to support one claim, so name the claim in the margin and move on.
Darwin anticipates objections constantly, and 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. Coates reads his own audiobook, audio recordings of Darwin and Forster exist in the public domain, and there are recorded lectures on Plato, Genesis, and Darwin from reputable university sources. These are supplements, and please mark them 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 all live in the assigned edition, and every quotation in your writing has to come from there.

The Glossary Habit

Please 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 a hard read gets easier the moment you stop re-deriving what a word means each time you meet it. One line per word will do: the word, where you met it, and your own working definition, which you revise when the text proves you wrong.

Where to Get Help

The Center for Writing and Speaking supports reading as well as writing. Bring them a passage that won’t open, a draft that won’t start, or a reading schedule that keeps collapsing. Our course Writing Fellow, my office hours, and your classmates’ marginalia are all fair game too. Asking for help with a hard text 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 a draft, then a Writing Fellow conference, then a revision. That sequence isn’t busywork. It assumes that writing gets rewritten, and that nobody, including your professors and the authors on this syllabus, produces finished thinking in one pass. The scaffolded deadlines exist so that your conference happens while 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 any of this stops making sense for you, please say so. The design is here to serve the learning, and not the other way around.

Submission

Nothing to submit. This is a reference page, so please come back to it whenever a reading resists you.

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