Chapter 5: Understanding Messages 

Karen Rosenberg

If at First You Fall Asleep . . .

During my first year in college, I feared many things: calculus, cafeteria food, the stained, sweet smelling mattress in the basement of my dorm. But I did not fear reading. I didn’t really think about reading at all, that automatic making of meaning from symbols in books, newspapers, on cereal boxes. And, indeed, some of my coziest memories of  that bewildering first year involved reading. I adopted an overstuffed red chair in the library that enveloped me like the lap of a department store Santa. I curled up many evenings during that first, brilliant autumn with my English homework: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest  Eye, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. I’d read a gorgeous passage, snuggle deeper into my chair, and  glance out to the sunset and fall leaves outside of the library window.  This felt deeply, unmistakably collegiate.

But English was a requirement—I planned to major in political science. I took an intro course my first semester and brought my readings  to that same chair. I curled up, opened a book on the Chinese Revolution, started reading, and fell asleep. I woke up a little drooly, surprised  at the harsh fluorescent light, the sudden pitch outside. Not to be deterred, I bit my lip and started over. I’d hold on for a paragraph or two, and then suddenly I’d be thinking about my classmate Joel’s elbows,  the casual way he’d put them on the desk when our professor lectured,  sometimes resting his chin in his hands. He was a long limbed runner and smelled scrubbed—a mixture of laundry detergent and shampoo.  He had black hair and startling blue eyes. Did I find him sexy?

Crap! How many paragraphs had my eyes glazed over while I was  thinking about Joel’s stupid elbows? By the end of that first semester, I abandoned ideas of majoring in political science. I vacillated between  intense irritation with my assigned readings and a sneaking suspicion  that perhaps the problem was me—I was too dumb to read academic  texts. Whichever it was—a problem with the readings or with me—I  carefully chose my classes so that I could read novels, poetry, and plays  for credit. But even in my English classes, I discovered, I had to read dense scholarly articles. By my Junior year, I trained myself to spend days from dawn until dusk hunkered over a carrel in the library’s basement armed with a dictionary and a rainbow of highlighters. Enjoying  my reading seemed hopelessly naïve—an indulgence best reserved for  beach blankets and bathtubs. A combination of obstinacy, butt-numbingly hard chairs, and caffeine helped me survive my scholarly reading  assignments. But it wasn’t fun.

Seven years later I entered graduate school. I was also working and  living on my own, cooking for myself instead of eating off cafeteria  trays. In short, I had a life. My days were not the blank canvas they  had been when I was an undergraduate and could sequester myself in  the dungeon of the library basement. And so, I finally learned how  to read smarter, not harder. Perhaps the strangest part of my reading  transformation was that I came to like reading those dense scholarly  articles; I came to crave the process of sucking the marrow from the  texts. If you can relate to this, if you also love wrestling with academic  journal articles, take joy in arguing with authors in the margins of the  page, I am not writing for you.

However, if your reading assignments confound you, if they send  you into slumber, or you avoid them, or they seem to take you way too  long, then pay attention. Based on my experience as a frustrated student and now as a teacher of reading strategies, I have some insights to  share with you designed to make the reading process more productive,  more interesting, and more enjoyable.

Joining the Conversation1 

Even though it may seem like a solitary, isolated activity, when you read a scholarly work, you are participating in a conversation. Academic  writers do not make up their arguments off the top of their heads  (or solely from creative inspiration). Rather, they look at how others  have approached similar issues and problems. Your job—and one for  which you’ll get plenty of help from your professors and your peers—is  to locate the writer and yourself in this larger conversation. Reading  academic texts is a deeply social activity; talking with your professors  and peers about texts can not only help you understand your readings  better, but it can push your thinking and clarify your own stances on  issues that really matter to you.

In your college courses, you may have come across the term “rhetorical reading.”2 Rhetoric in this context refers to how texts work to  persuade readers—a bit different from the common connotation of  empty, misleading, or puffed up speech. Rhetorical reading refers to a  set of practices designed to help us understand how texts work and to  engage more deeply and fully in a conversation that extends beyond  the boundaries of any particular reading. Rhetorical reading practices  ask us to think deliberately about the role and relationship between the  writer, reader, and text.

When thinking about the writer, we are particularly interested in  clues about the writer’s motivation and agenda. If we know something  about what the writer cares about and is trying to accomplish, it can  help orient us to the reading and understand some of the choices the  writer makes in his or her work.

As readers, our role is quite active. We pay attention to our own  motivation and agenda for each reading. On one level, our motivation may be as simple as wanting to do well in a class, and our agenda  may involve wanting to understand as much as necessary in order to  complete our assignments. In order to meet these goals, we need to go  deeper, asking, “Why is my professor asking me to read this piece?”  You may find clues in your course syllabus, comments your professor  makes in class, or comments from your classmates. If you aren’t sure  why you are being asked to read something, ask! Most professors will  be more than happy to discuss in general terms what “work” they want  a reading to do—for example, to introduce you to a set of debates, to  provide information on a specific topic, or to challenge conventional  thinking on an issue.

Finally, there is the text—the thing that the writer wrote and that  you are reading. In addition to figuring out what the text says, rhetorical reading strategies ask us to focus on how the text delivers its  message. In this way of thinking about texts, there is not one right  and perfect meaning for the diligent reader to uncover; rather, interpretations of the reading will differ depending on the questions and  contexts readers bring to the text.

Strategies for Rhetorical Reading

Here are some ways to approach your reading that better equip you  for the larger conversation. First, consider the audience. When the  writer sat down to write your assigned reading, to whom was he or  she implicitly talking? Textbooks, for the most part, have students like  you in mind. They may be boring, but you’ve probably learned what to  do with them: pay attention to the goals of the chapter, check out the  summary at the end, ignore the text in the boxes because it’s usually  more of a “fun fact” than something that will be on the test, and so  on. Magazines in the checkout line at the supermarket also have you in  mind: you can’t help but notice headlines about who is cheating or fat  or anorexic or suicidal. Writers of scholarly sources, on the other hand,  likely don’t think much about you at all when they sit down to write.  Often, academics write primarily for other academics. But just because  it’s people with PhDs writing for other people with PhDs doesn’t mean  that you should throw in the towel. There’s a formula for these types of  texts, just like there’s a formula for all the Cosmo articles that beckon  with titles that involve the words “hot,” “sex tips,” “your man,” and  “naughty” in different configurations.

It’s just that the formula is a little more complicated. The formula also changes depending on the flavor of study (physics, management, sociology, English, etc.) and the venue. However, if  you determine that the audience for your reading is other academics,  recognize that you are in foreign territory. You won’t understand all of  the chatter you hear on street corners, you may not be able to read the  menus in the restaurants, but, with a little practice, you will be able  to find and understand the major road signs, go in the right direction, and find your way.

How can you figure out the primary audience? First, look at the  publication venue. (Here, to some extent, you can judge a book by its cover). If the reading comes from an academic journal, then chances  are good that the primary audience is other academics. Clues that a  journal is academic (as opposed to popular, like Time or Newsweek)  include a citation format that refers to a volume number and an issue  number, and often this information appears at the top or bottom of  every page.

Sometimes you can tell if a reading comes from an academic journal based on the title—e.g., do the Journal for Research in  Mathematics Education or Qualitative Research in Psychology sound like they are written for a popular audience? What if you’re still not sure?  Ask your reference librarians, classmates, your instructor, or friends  and family who have more experience with these types of readings than you do.

There are two implications that you should be aware of if you are  not the primary audience for a text. First, the author will assume prior  knowledge that you likely don’t have. You can expect sentences like “as  Durkheim has so famously argued . . .” or “much ink has been spilled  on the implications of the modernization hypothesis” where you have  no idea who Durkheim is or what the modernization hypothesis says.  That’s OK. It might even be OK to not look these things up at all and  still get what you need from the reading (but you won’t know that yet).  In the first reading of an article, it’s smart to hold off on looking too  many things up. Just be prepared to face a wall of references that don’t  mean a whole lot to you.

Second, if you’re not the primary audience, don’t be surprised if  you find that the writing isn’t appealing to you. Whereas a novelist  or a magazine writer works hard to draw us in as readers, many academic authors don’t use strategies to keep us hooked. In fact, many of  these strategies (use of sensory language, suspense, etc.) would never  get published in academic venues. By the same token, you’ll use very  different strategies to read these scholarly texts.

You may be wondering, if you’re not the intended audience for the  text, why do you have to read it in the first place? This is an excellent  question, and one that you need to answer before you do your reading.  As I mentioned earlier in the discussion of the role of the reader, you  may need to do a little sleuthing to figure this out. In addition to the  suggestions I provided earlier, look to your course notes and syllabus  for answers. Often professors will tell you why they assign specific  readings. Pay attention—they will likely offer insights on the context  of the reading and the most important points. If after all of this, you still have no idea why you’re supposed to read six articles on the history of Newtonian physics, then ask your professor. Use the answers to  help you focus on the really important aspects of the texts and to gloss  over the parts that are less relevant to your coursework. If you remain  confused, continue to ask for clarification. Ask questions in class (your  classmates will be grateful). Go to office hours. Most faculty love the opportunity to talk about readings that they have chosen with care. Once you have an idea who the intended audience is for the article  and why you are assigned to read it, don’t sit down and read the article  from start to finish, like a good mystery. Get a lay of the land before  you go too deep. One way to do this is to study the architecture of the  article. Here are some key components to look for:

The title. As obvious as it sounds, pay attention to the title because  it can convey a lot of information that can help you figure out how to  read the rest of the article more efficiently. Let’s say that I know my  reading will be about the Russian Revolution. Let’s say I even know  that it will be about the role of music in the Russian Revolution. Let’s  say the title is “‘Like the beating of my heart’: A discourse analysis  of Muscovite musicians’ letters during the Russian Revolution.” This  tells me not only the subject matter of the article (something about  letters Russian musicians wrote during the Revolution) but it also tells  me something about the methodology, or the way that the author approaches the subject matter. I might not know exactly what discourse  analysis is, but I can guess that you can do it to letters and that I  should pay particular attention to it when the author mentions it in the article. On the other hand, if the title of the article were “Garbage cans and metal pipes: Bolshevik music and the politics of proletariat  propaganda” I would know to look out for very different words and concepts. Note, also, that the convention within some academic disciplines to have a pretty long title separated by a colon usually follows a  predictable pattern. The text to the left of the colon serves as a teaser,  or as something to grab a reader’s attention (remember that the author is likely not trying to grab your attention, so you may not find  these teasers particularly effective—though it is probably packed with  phrases that would entice someone who already studies the topic). The  information to the right of the colon typically is a more straightforward explanation of what the article is about.

The abstract. Not all of your readings will come with abstracts, but when they do, pay close attention. An abstract is like an executive summary. Usually one paragraph at the beginning of an article, the abstract serves to encapsulate the main points of the article. It’s  generally a pretty specialized summary that seeks to answer specific  questions. These include: the main problem or question, the approach (how did the author(s) do the work they write about in the article?), the shiny new thing that this article does (more on this later, but to  be published in an academic journal you often need to argue that you are doing something that has not been done before), and why people  who are already invested in this field should care (in other words, you should be able to figure out why another academic should find the article important). The abstract often appears in database searches, and  helps scholars decide if they want to seek out the full article.

That’s a whole lot to accomplish in one paragraph. As a result, authors often use specialized jargon to convey complex ideas in a few words, make assumptions of prior knowledge, and don’t  worry much about general readability. Abstracts, thus, are generally  dense, and it’s not uncommon to read through an abstract and not  have a clue about what you just read. This is a good place to re-read,  highlight, underline, look up what you don’t know. You still may not  have a firm grasp on everything in the abstract, but treat the key terms  in the abstract like parts of a map when you see them in the main text, leading you to treasure: understanding the main argument.

        The introduction. The introduction serves some of the same functions as the abstract, but there is a lot more breathing room here. When  I started reading academic texts, I’d breeze through the introduction  to get to the “meat” of the text. This was exactly the wrong thing to  do. I can’t remember how many times I’d find myself in the middle of  some dense reading, perhaps understanding the content of a particular  paragraph, but completely unable to connect that paragraph with the  overall structure of the article. I’d jump from the lily pad of one para

graph to the next, continually fearful that I’d slip off and lose myself  in a sea of total confusion (and I often did slip).

If the author is doing her/his job well, the introduction will not  only summarize the whole piece, present the main idea, and tell us  why we should care, but it will also often offer a road map for the rest  of the article. Sometimes, the introduction will be called “introduction,” which makes things easy. Sometimes, it’s not. Generally, treat  the first section of an article as the introduction, regardless if it’s explicitly called that or not.

There are times where your reading will have the introduction chopped off. This makes your work harder. The two most common instances of introduction-less readings are assigned excerpts of articles  and lone book chapters. In the first case, you only have a portion of  an article so you cannot take advantage of many of the context clues  the writer set out for readers. You will need to rely more heavily on the context of your course in general and your assignment in particular  to find your bearings here. If the reading is high stakes (e.g., if you have to write a paper or take an exam on it), you may want to ask your  professor how you can get the whole article.

In the second case, your professor assigns a chapter or two from the middle of an academic book. The chapter will hopefully contain some introductory material  (and generally will include much more than the middle of a journal article), but you will likely be missing some context clues that the author  included in the introduction to the whole book. If you have trouble  finding your footing here, and it’s important that you grasp the meaning and significance of the chapter, seek out the book itself and skim  the introductory chapter to ground you in the larger questions that the  author is addressing. Oddly, even though you’ll be doing more reading, it may save you time because you can read your assigned chapter(s)  more efficiently.

Roadmaps included in the introduction are often surprisingly  straightforward. They often are as simple as “in the first section, we examine . . . in the second section we argue . . .” etc. Search for these  maps. Underline them. Highlight them. Go back to them when you  find your comprehension slipping.

Section headings. A section heading serves as a title for a particular part of an article. Read all of these to get a sense of the trajectory  of the text before delving into the content in each section (with the exception of the introduction and the conclusion which you should read  in detail). Get a passing familiarity with the meanings of the words in  the section headings—they are likely important to understanding the  main argument of the text.

Conclusion. When writing papers, you’ve likely heard the cliché  “in the introduction, write what you will say, then say it, then write  what you just said.” With this formula, it would seem logical to gloss  over the conclusion, because, essentially, you’ve already read it already.  However, this is not the case. Instead, pay close attention to the conclusion. It can help you make sure you understood the introduction.

Sometimes a slight re-phrasing can help you understand the author’s arguments in an important, new way. In addition, the conclusion is  often where authors indicate the limitations of their work, the unanswered questions, the horizons left unexplored. And this is often the  land of exam and essay questions . . . asking you to extend the author’s  analysis beyond its own shores.  

At this point, you have pored over the title, the introduction, the  section headings, and the conclusion. You haven’t really read the body  of the article yet. Your next step is to see if you can answer the question: what is the main argument or idea in this text?

Figuring out the main argument is the key to reading the text effectively and efficiently. Once you can identify the main argument, you  can determine how much energy to spend on various parts of the reading. For example, if I am drowning in details about the temperance  movement in the United States in the 19th Century, I need to know  the main argument of the text to know if I need to slow down or if a  swift skim will do. If the main argument is that women’s organizing has taken different forms in different times, it will probably be enough  for me to understand that women organized against the sale and consumption of alcohol. That might involve me looking up “temperance” and getting the gist of women’s organizing. However, if the main argument were that scholars have misunderstood the role of upper class  white women in temperance organizing in Boston from 1840–1865,  then I would probably need to slow down and pay closer attention.

Unless the reading is billed as a review or a synthesis, the only way that an academic text can even get published is if it claims to argue something new or different. However, unlike laundry detergent or soft drinks, academic articles don’t advertise what makes them new and different in block letters inside cartoon bubbles. In fact, finding the main argument can sometimes be tricky. Mostly, though, it’s just a matter of knowing where to look. The abstract and the introduction  are the best places to look first. With complicated texts, do this work with your classmates, visit your campus writing center (many of them help with reading assignments), or drag a friend into it.

Once you understand the different parts of the text and the writer’s  main argument, use this information to see how and where you can  enter the conversation. In addition, keep your own agenda as a reader in mind as you do this work.

Putting It All Together

Collectively, these suggestions and guidelines will help you read and understand academic texts. They ask you to bring a great deal of awareness and preparation to your reading—for example, figuring out who  the primary audience is for the text and, if you are not that audience,  why your professor is asking you to read it anyway. Then, instead of  passively reading the text from start to finish, my suggestions encourage you to pull the reading into its constituent parts—the abstract, the  introduction, the section headings, conclusion, etc.—and read them unevenly and out of order to look for the holy grail of the main argument. Once you have the main argument you can make wise decisions about which parts of the text you need to pore over and which you can blithely skim. The final key to reading smarter, not harder is to make  it social. When you have questions, ask. Start conversations with your  professors about the reading. Ask your classmates to work with you to  find the main arguments. Offer a hand to your peers who are drowning in dense details. Academics write to join scholarly conversations. Your professors assign you their texts so that you can join them too.

Discussion 

1. Pick one reading strategy above that you may have used in reading a text previously (like paying close attention to the introduction of a book, chapter, or article). Discuss the ways in which this strategy worked for you and/or didn’t work for you. Would you recommend friends use this strategy? (How) might you amend it, and when might you use it again?
2. The author writes in several places about reading academic texts as entering a conversation. What does this mean to you? How can you have a conversation with a text?
3. 3. How might the reading strategies discussed in this article have an impact on your writing? Will you be more aware of your introduction, conclusion, and clues you leave throughout the text for readers? Talk with other writers to see what they may have learned about writing from this article on reading strategies.

Notes 

1. In this discussion I draw on Norgaard’s excellent discussion of reading as joining a conversation (1–28). By letting you, the reader, know this  in a footnote, I am not only citing my source (I’d be plagiarizing if I didn’t  mention this somewhere), but I’m also showing how I enter this conversation  and give you a trail to follow if you want to learn more about the metaphor  of the conversation. Following standard academic convention, I put the full  reference to Norgaard’s text at the end of this article, in the references.

2. I draw on—and recommend—Rounsaville et al.’s discussion of rhetorical sensitivity, critical reading and rhetorical reading (1–35).

Works Cited

Norgaard, Rolf. Composing Knowledge: Readings for College Writers. Boston:  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. Print.

Rounsaville, Angela, Rachel Goldberg, Keith Feldman, Cathryn Cabral, and  Anis Bawarshi, eds. Situating Inquiry: An Introduction to Reading, Re search, and Writing at the University of Washington. Boston: Bedford/St.  Martin’s, 2008. Print.

Understanding Credibility

Ellen Carillo and Alice Horning 

Overview 

Because reading and writing are related interpretive practices, attending to critical reading is an important part of teaching writing. This section defines critical reading and offers students strategies for undertaking a specific kind of critical reading, namely reading for credibility, particularly of online sources. The section gives examples of  the importance of reading for credibility in a variety of situations,  including one’s day-to-day life and while engaged in academic projects. Specifically, students are introduced to what is called “lateral reading,”  an approach that helps students determine a source’s credibility by  leaving the source and seeing what is said about it elsewhere on the Web. To support this approach, this section provides definitions of misinformation and disinformation, addresses the difference between  primary and secondary sources, and teaches students the importance of  recognizing bias in sources and in themselves.

Both of us writing this section are scholars who teach our own students that good reading skills are essential to developing effective writing  abilities. We have both published books and articles in this area and  over the years have claimed to know a lot about the best ways to teach critical reading. With this background, you would think that we’d both be really effective critical readers, but Alice recently had her come-up pance at the hands of the Internet. Here’s what happened: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when information about ways to stay safe was being circulated, Alice received an e-mail from a colleague she considers a highly reliable source. The message had been forwarded to her colleague  from someone purporting to be a physician whose daughter works in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins, one of the nation’s leading  hospitals. It seemed like a good source: it contained a number of pieces of familiar, general advice about handwashing, social distancing, and  masks, all information we have heard dozens of times. But it also contained what Alice later realized was some suspicious advice for killing  the virus. For instance: “Any mix with 1 part bleach and 5 parts water  directly dissolves the protein, breaks it down from the inside,” and  “UV LIGHT on any object that may contain it breaks down the virus protein.” The email also described how alcohol could be used to kill the  virus, but warned in all caps, “NO SPIRITS, NOR VODKA” but  “Listerine will work—65% alcohol” (“Covid Precautions”). 

Looking back now, Alice realizes that various other wacky points appeared in the message. Still, she sent it along to friends and family  including her daughters, one of whom is a public health nurse. Her daughter fired back quite soon to point out an assortment of errors and misleading claims, noting that she and her professional colleagues were  very concerned about the amount of misinformation and disinformation being passed around in just this way. As a reading scholar who has taught others about the importance of credible sources, Alice was appalled and  embarrassed. She had to send follow-up messages telling one and all to disregard what she had just sent. Where, oh where, were her critical reading skills?  

Alice’s daughter’s response also points to two words that sound a lot alike, but actually mean two different things. In the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy, Ellen has defined these terms carefully and we want you to have these definitions in mind as you read this section because they will help you understand the two different ways you can be misled by information on the Web: “Both [misinformation and disinformation] describe factually incorrect information. The difference between the two  is intent. Disinformation involves maliciously spreading wrong  information. Misinformation is incorrect information, but it is not  spread with malicious intent” (Carillo 13). Among all of the credible  information on the Web there is also misinformation and  disinformation, and critical reading skills are crucial to identifying the differences. We will come back to these terms a bit later, but we hope you will keep them, as well as Alice’s cautionary tale, in mind.

What Do We Mean by Critical Reading? 

You may be thinking to yourself, “I already know how to read.” We realize  that if you are reading this section you are likely in college and have been reading—as in decoding language—for more than a decade, maybe more  than two or three decades. Critical reading is different from just reading or decoding language, though. Critical reading is really an umbrella term—an expansive and encompassing term—for focused, purposeful, and deep  reading practices. In other words, critical reading is more than simply  passing your eyes over words. This section will teach you about reading  for credibility, one kind of critical reading. Specifically, we will describe  how “reading laterally”—or across many sources—can help you judge the  credibility of a single source and find quality information online.

What Is Credibility?

If a source is credible, that means it is trustworthy. While you can trust the nonfiction and informational texts (e.g., textbooks and scholarly articles) that your instructors assign because these have likely already been vetted— or approved—by experts in that field, you will often find yourself in the position of needing to locate additional sources as you conduct research in a first-year writing course or as you move into your chosen major. The Web has plenty of credible information on it, but the sheer volume of information can make the process of finding this information more  challenging. What we say in this section to help you judge a source’s credibility is applicable across disciplines and even in your personal life, too, as evidenced by the example that opened this section. 

Moving Beyond Your Source to Evaluate Its Credibility

There are many ways of evaluating sources, some of which you are likely familiar with. You may have experience applying different kinds of  checklists—such as the CRAAP (Credibility, Relevance, Authority,  Accuracy, and Purpose) Checklist, which allows you to determine whether  the source you are reading is “CRAAP.” This approach, wherein you ask a series of questions about the source and answer these questions by looking more closely at the source itself, has been used for decades, but as Stanford University researcher Sarah McGrew and her colleagues explain:

The checklist approach falls short because it underestimates just how sophisticated the web has become. Worse, the approach trains students’ attention on the website itself, thus cutting them off from the most efficient route to learning  more about a site: finding out what the rest of the web has to say  (after all, that’s why we call it a web). (7)  

To replace this outdated approach, these educators offer what they call  “lateral reading,” which, instead, involves leaving the source and moving to  other sources across (i.e., laterally) the Web to assess the source’s credibility.

McGrew and her colleague Sam Wineburg at Stanford introduced the  concept of “lateral reading” after they conducted a study of how three  different groups of people assessed the credibility of sources, among other  tasks. Wineburg and McGrew gave professional fact checkers, Stanford  undergraduate students, and historians with PhDs various digital sources that addressed social and political issues and asked them to evaluate them  in various ways, including for credibility. Wineburg and McGrew observed how these three groups did so. They found that the undergraduates and  historians took the traditional “vertical” approach to assessment, remaining tethered to the single source/site and looked closely—up and  down it in a vertical fashion—to consider the different elements of the source itself, including site design; whether there were any errors or typos; and if the source included references. The professional fact checkers, however, immediately left the source to assess its credibility. They opened tab after tab to search for information about the source, including about the site’s sponsoring organization and the author  (Wineburg and McGrew 19). They also reviewed references to the  source, site, organization, or author they found elsewhere (Wineburg and  McGrew 19).  

Professional fact-checkers capitalize on what the Web has to offer—a seemingly limitless number of other sources to use for the purpose of cross-referencing and corroboration. This practice holds  promise for students as well (Rodrigue; Wineburg and McGrew;  McGrew et al.; Caulfield). In the following sections, we share some steps for taking this approach to reading the credibility of online sources.  

Steps for Reading Laterally to Assess the Credibility of Online Sources 

1. Leave the site to do a quick check as to whether it appears on other fact-checking or hoax-busting sites. This step can save you a lot of time, especially if someone has already reported the site. You may already be familiar with Snopes, perhaps the most well-known  fact-checking site, but there are other nonpartisan sites such as  PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that can be helpful, too.
2. Leave the site in question to explore more about the author of the piece. What can you find out about the author elsewhere on the Web? Does the author seem like an expert on the subject? What else has the author written? Is the author affiliated with any organizations or groups? How might this information allow you  to recognize any biases the author may have?
3. Leave the site in question to explore more about the site itself. If you did not locate the site on one of the fact-checking sites listed above, then do a simple Google search. What can you find out about the site? Who or what (i.e., a company or organization) sponsors or owns the site? Does that ownership suggest any biases? What seems to be the intended purpose of the site? Is the site selling anything? Who is the audience for the site? Are visitors to the site looking to purchase something? Does a commercial aspect of the site may have potentially conflict with the information it provides?

As you move through these steps you want to do so deliberately and “take your bearings” as you do so. The successful fact checkers in Wineburg and McGrew’s study regularly took their bearings, which  amounted to making a plan for moving forward (12). Applying the steps above, the following plan emerges: Beginning with #1, keep track of any  fact-checking sites that suggest the source/site in question is not credible. As you move onto #2 and #3 to other sites where you read  about the author and the site in question, track the credibility of those  sites, too. Move outward from them to read about those sites on at least  three other sites or until you feel confident and have not found any  conflicting information about their credibility. Make notes as you go.  Finally, review your notes in order to make an informed determination  about the credibility of the source in question.

Recognizing the Difference Between Primary Sources  and Secondary Sources While Reading Laterally

As you are reading laterally you will likely encounter both primary and  secondary sources. Primary sources provide first-hand or direct  information and include photographs, video and audio recordings, letters,  diaries, government documents, speeches, historical documents, pieces  of literature, art, research studies, and interviews. Secondary sources offer secondary accounts of the information or evidence in a primary source. Secondary  sources are about primary sources. Secondary sources include book and  movie reviews, scholarly articles about novels, and news stories about  scientific studies. Secondary sources summarize, interpret, or draw on primary sources in some way.  

Going to a primary source can be an important part of reading laterally because it will allow you to recognize bias in the secondary sources you  locate, which is important to judging the credibility of a source (more on  that below). While finding different perspectives on a subject in the form of secondary sources is useful—and your instructor may require you to  locate secondary sources—going to the primary source allows you to first  form your own judgments, interpretations, and conclusions without  being swayed by what others think. For example, an article that draws on  a scientific study may contain a hyperlink to that study, the primary  source. By reading the study before you read the article about the study  (the secondary source) you can form your own ideas without allowing  the article to influence you. Even if a secondary source does not contain  a hyperlink to the primary source you can usually locate the primary  source by consulting the reference information included either in the  secondary source or on a reference page at its end. The Web is filled with  secondary sources, which sometimes makes it difficult to find primary  sources, but locating primary sources while reading laterally will give you  the freedom to form your own judgments about the information rather  than relying on a secondary source to do so for you.

Using Lateral Reading to Determine the Credibility of Online Images  

Lateral reading is a useful practice when it comes to determining the  credibility of online images, too. The saying goes, “seeing is believing,” but with so many ways to manipulate images, seeing is no longer believing.  Unfortunately, some primary sources, such as photographs, may be  manipulated by Photoshop and other software that has become widely available. Photoshop and similar software have been used in many ways  and to a range of ends. For example, Fox News cropped President Donald Trump from a picture in which he appears alongside convicted sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell (Davidoff Studios/ Getty Images). You can see the original picture contains four people, including Trump, and the cropped picture, which appeared during a Fox News program, contains all but Trump (Fox News). Fox News later apologized for what was described as an error.

In other instances, two or more photographs have been merged to do the exact opposite— to put someone alongside another person or people in order to discredit them. For example, as Senator John Kerry was  campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004, a picture of him from 1971 was merged with a picture of Jane Fonda from 1972 (Mikkelson). The composite was intended to discredit Kerry, a  Vietnam War veteran, by placing him alongside Fonda who was an anti-Vietnam war activist and thought to be unpatriotic by many Americans.  

You can conduct a reverse image search on the Web to validate the  authenticity of images, which, when paired with lateral reading, can give  you insight into a photograph’s credibility. Google’s support pages offer  specific instructions. Conducting a reverse image search will render a list  of other places on the Web where the image appears. You can then read laterally to locate the original image, as well as other versions of that image,  which will help you establish the credibility of the image in question.

You can use the same lateral reading approach to assess the credibility of videos. You may have heard of deepfake videos, which are videos that  have been manipulated to show people saying and doing things that they  did not actually do. Deepfake technology is advancing very quickly,  making it difficult to discern a video that has been manipulated. As of  writing this chapter, the best way to recognize a deepfake video is to  look for inconsistencies between what people are saying in the video and  what they have said in other contexts; depending on when you’re  reading this, you may need to search for more ways to recognize  deepfakes based on rapidly changing technology. Reading laterally to  locate those other contexts—whether videos, articles, or interviews—will  help you recognize these inconsistencies. Additionally, recognizing  inconsistencies in the video itself can also suggest that it has been  manipulated, whether the lighting seems to change throughout, or the way the person’s face or eyes are illuminated changes over the course of  the video (Sample). There may also be more glaring issues, including  bad lip-syncing. The point is that we are seeing disinformation circulate  at a faster pace than ever before and the technologies to manipulate  images and videos are moving at a similarly fast pace. Be cautious with  primary sources, particularly if the source is a photograph or video, and be  sure to use available resources, including the lateral reading approach, to assess credibility.

Addressing Bias While Reading Laterally  

Reading laterally can help you assess the credibility of everything from news articles to videos, but as you read laterally, you need to recognize how bias informs both what you read and how you read. You are likely familiar with the term “bias,” usually thought of as a personal opinion or preference  that makes it impossible to see an idea objectively. Keep in mind the difference between biased information and incorrect information. While biased information is skewed in some way, incorrect information is just  plain wrong. Although some media outlets have been criticized because of  their dissemination of incorrect information, bias is the more common culprit. For example, a few minutes on Fox News, MSNBC and the  PBS News-hour will give you a sense of bias, particularly if you are  careful to watch the reporting on the same event. One helpful resource for considering the potential bias in news sources is the free, basic  version of the Interactive Media Bias chart, which gives an overview of many news outlets and their relative political positions, providing insight into their biases.

Beyond recognizing the role bias plays across media outlets, you will also need to be able to negotiate bias when completing source-driven  writing assignments in your classes. Suppose your class has been discussing  the regulation of the Internet, and you are assigned to investigate the  controversial subject of Internet privacy protection. You know personal  information, financial status, and health issues should be stored securely.  However, businesses might want access to this information in order to  offer you products and services related to your needs as revealed by  your searches. Each side would be biased in its own favor, and your job as a critical reader is to provide a fair discussion of these differing views of  appropriate regulation. Remember that you cannot somehow remove bias  from these sources. Instead, your role is to recognize the bias in each perspective, consider its effect on the source’s credibility, and negotiate it  as you develop your own point of view or argument.  

If you are writing about the regulation of the Internet, for example, you would want to begin by searching for sources on the subject. An article by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will give you an overview of  Internet privacy legislation, including by state, while an article from a different source, ProPublica, will give you a more targeted and detailed  look at how Facebook seeks to protect its users’ privacy through  policies that prohibit advertisers from misusing the platform (“Status of  Internet Privacy Legislation By State”; Angwin and Parris). Reading vertically on each site’s “About” link will give you a sense of who is  behind each site, but as we have pointed out, reading vertically is problematic. For example, while the ACLU claims to be a non-partisan, nonprofit organization engaged in  defense of civil liberties, a lateral search of critics of the ACLU produces a 2020 article by the overtly conservative Heritage Foundation that makes clear that the ACLU has its own biases (Canaparo). In other words, moving beyond the ACLU’s own site provides relevant information  about its biases that its own “About” section doesn’t reveal.  

The same series of steps with ProPublica show that it, too, claims to be a nonprofit, non-partisan reporting site, but moving away from the source reveals that it leans left, according to AllSides, another valuable site that evaluates bias (“About Us”; “ProPublica Media Bias Ranking”). At this point, you would want to take your bearings and move forward by locating sources that balance those liberal perspectives that are likely to value an individual’s privacy over the freedoms of large companies and  corporations. Further lateral reading of the sources cited in each article  (by following embedded links or opening new tabs), as well as the citations  in the other sources you locate will help you to see bias more clearly. Thus, taking bearings and using lateral reading strategies can reveal bias in all  kinds of material, which is crucial to negotiating the credibility of sources  and rep-resenting controversial issues in fair and balanced ways.  

Recognizing Your Own Biases

It’s not just sources that are biased. All of us are biased, and this can get in the way of effective reading and research habits. Some of our biases come  from our backgrounds and experiences, plus what you learn at home and  school. Each day we are exposed to large amounts of information that  attempt to sway our views. When people get stuck in their own beliefs,  and only seek out and believe evidence to support their views, the  process is known as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias can be especially  problematic when you are conducting research because it can get in the way of your valuing sources that offer different perspectives from your  own. As dangerous as this practice is, it’s fairly common, according to Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt: “People tend to seek  out and attend to information that already confirms their beliefs. We find such information more trustworthy and are less critical of it, even  when we are presented with credible, seemingly unassailable facts that  suggest otherwise” (33). Confirmation bias can result in choosing sources that confirm ideas or information you already know or believe,  which can be counterproductive

whether you are writing a research essay, seeking information for health  and safety reasons, or making a decision about which candidate to vote for.  

Recognizing confirmation bias, though, is a first step toward  mitigating it, as psychologist Raymond S. Nickerson of Tufts University points out: “Perhaps simply being aware of the confirmation bias—of its  pervasiveness and of the many guises in which it appears—might help one both to be a little cautious about making up one’s mind quickly on  important issues and to be somewhat more open to opinions that differ from one’s own than one might otherwise be” (211). In terms of critical reading this means that you should regularly monitor the perspectives  in the sources you choose to ensure that you are not only relying on  sources that always already confirm your ideas. Additionally, you should  deliberately seek out sources that oppose your ideas so you have a more well-rounded understanding of the subject and offer a fair appraisal of a topic or issue.  

Additional Tips that Draw on Lateral Reading

Reading laterally can help you assess the credibility of the information,  including photographs and videos, you find online and help you read more  deeply. To further support your lateral reading, we offer the following tips  that draw on the lateral reading approach  

Tip 1: Click on Hyperlinks. Research has shown that in many cases students don’t take full advantage  of what the Web has to offer (Rodrigue; Wineburg and McGrew; McGrew  et al.; Purdy). Even though studies suggest that students prefer texts with  hyperlinks, particularly when they are conducting research, they don’t  always click on them (Purdy; Vassileva and Chankova; Rodrigue). Does this characterize your way of reading online? Instead of clicking on  hyperlinks embedded in news stories and other online texts students often  simply read online texts as if they were print texts. Keep in mind that  online texts are connected to other texts, and those texts are connected to  others. Actively following hyperlinks can deepen your reading experience  by directing you to primary sources, related sources, and texts that can provide additional context for what you are reading.

Tip 2: Open New Tabs. Just as you can deepen your reading experience by following hyperlinks  you can do the same by opening new tabs to further explore your subject.

Not all online texts have hyperlinks embedded in them. As such, it may be  up to you to take the initiative to seek out additional information. Like hyperlinks, opening new tabs can help you learn more about a subject, create  some context for it, explore what others have said about it, and read up on  relevant definitions or related ideas. The possibilities really are endless but  only if you allow your curiosity to guide you.  

Tip 3: Move Around the Web Deliberately. We have all had the experience of starting somewhere on the Web and then two hours later having no idea how we got to where we ended up. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and you can stumble upon  useful material inadvertently. But, when you are conducting research for an assignment or out of a personal interest, it’s important to practice two  behaviors that Wineburg and McGrew noticed the professional fact checkers engaging in: “taking bearings” and “click restraint.” As noted  above, taking bearings involves “charting a plan for moving forward,” as do sailors, so that you are moving purposefully in a productive direction  (Wineburg and McGrew 30). When you practice click restraint, you don’t trust that the first results that a search engine like Google Scholar  generates are necessarily the most relevant, but instead you spend time  “scanning the search engine results page and reading the snippets before  clicking on any link” to make an informed decision about where to go (Wineburg and McGrew 28). Both of these practices slow you down, which is the first step toward a deeper reading experience.

Final Thoughts

Some of the strategies presented in this section may be new to you while  you may already be familiar with others. Enriching your online reading  practices involves paying closer attention to how you already read online  sources and how you currently judge their credibility. Once you reflect on  your current practices you can then fill in any gaps with the strategies laid out in this section. New reading practices may seem cumbersome at first,  but they will soon enough become second nature. Just remember not to let  your guard down like Alice did!

Works Cited

“About Us.” ProPublica, https://www.propublica.org/about. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

ACT. The Condition of College and Career Readiness, 2019. http://www.act.org/ content/act/en/research/reports/act-publications/condition-of-college-and-ca reer-readiness-2019.html. Accessed 25 Aug. 2020.

Angwin, Julia, and Terry Parris Jr. “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by  Race.” ProPublica, 28 Oct. 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/face book-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. Buy Dehydrated Water. https://buydehydratedwatercom.weebly.com/. Accessed 29  Mar. 2021.

Canaparo, Giancarlo. “The ACLU Loses Its Way.” The Heritage Foundation, 19 May 2020, https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/commentary/the-aclu loses-its-way. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Carillo, Ellen C. MLA Guide to Digital Literacy. MLA, 2019.

Caulfield, Mike. “How ‘News Literacy’ Gets the Web Wrong.” Hapgood, 4 March  2017, www.hapgood.us/2017/03/04/how-news-literacy-gets-the-web-wrong. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. The Citation Project: Reframing the Conversation Around Plagiarism, http:// www.citationproject.net/. Accessed 6 April 2021.  

“Covid Precautions.” Received by Alice Horning, 30 March 2020. Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images. Trump, Knauss, Epstein and Max well at Mar-a-Lago. Palm Beach, Florida. 12 February 2000. https://www. gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/from-left-american-real-estate-develop er-donald-trump-and-news-photo/700334384?adppopup=true  “Dihydrogen Monoxide - DHMO Homepage.” Dihydrogen Monoxide Research  Division, http://www.dhmo.org/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Eberhardt, Jennifer L. Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What  We See, Think, and Do. Viking, 2019.  

FactCheck.org. https://www.factcheck.org/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. Food Babe. https://foodbabe.com/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Fox News. “Ghislane Maxwell Charged in Connection to Jeffrey Epstein Case,”  https://www.wishtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Fox-crop.jpg. Accessed  15 April 2021.  

“Homepage.” ProPublica.org, https://www.propublica.org/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. “Interactive Media Bias Chart.” Ad Fontes Media, https://www.adfontesmedia. com/interactive-media-bias-chart/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

McGrew, Sarah, et al. “Improving University Students’ Web Savvy: An Inter vention Study. British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 89, 2019, pp.  485-500.  

Mercola. https://www.mercola.com/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Mikkelson, David. “John Kerry.” Snopes, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ john-kerry-3/. Accessed 15 April 2021.  

The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. Nickerson, Raymond S. “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in  Many Guises.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998, pp. 175-220. PolitiFact. https://www.politifact.com/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. “ProPublica Media Bias Rating.” All Sides, https://www.allsides.com/news source/propublica. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Purdy, James P. “Why First-year College Students Select Online Research Re sources as Their Favorite.” First Monday, vol. 17, no. 9-3, 2012, http://first monday.org/article/view/4088/3289

Rodrigue, Tanya K. “The Digital Reader, The Alphabetic Writer, and The Space  Between: A Study in Digital Reading and Source-Based Writing” Computers  and Composition, vol. 46, 2017, pp. 4-20 .

Sample, Ian. “What Are Deepfakes and How You Can Spot Them.” The Guard ian, 13 Jan. 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/13/ what-are-deepfakes-and-how-can-you-spot-them.

Snopes.com. https://www.snopes.com/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. Stanford History Education Group. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of  Civic Online Reasoning. https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Ex ecutive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf. Accessed 25 Aug. 2020. “Status of Internet Privacy Legislation By State.” American Civil Liberties Union,  https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/internet-privacy/status-inter net-privacy-legislation-state. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

“The Taxonomy of Barney.” The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), 1995,  https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i1/barney.htm.  Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

“US & Canada News.” Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/us-canada. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Vassileva, Irena and Mariya Chankova. “Scholars’ Information Exploitation Habits in Multimedia Environment.” The Digital Scholar: Academic Communication in Multimedia Environment, edited by Irena Vassileva, Mariya Chankova,  Esther Breuer, and Klaus P. Schneider, Frank and Timme, 2020, pp. 61-91.  

The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021. Wineburg, Sam and Sarah McGrew. “Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information.” Teachers College Record, vol. 121, no. 11, 2019, pp. 1-40.  “World News.” The Jerusalem Post, https://www.jpost.com/international. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Teacher Resources for Effectively and Efficiently Reading the Credibility of Online Sources

We suggest that you use this section early in your term, or as soon as you  have students doing any kind of research project. The sooner you can help  students improve their critical reading skills, the better their overall work  will be. There is ample research of several different kinds that indicates  students’ difficulties with reading and assessing the credibility of online material. This research includes careful studies of students’ inability to  evaluate online materials (Stanford History Education Group); qualitative evaluations of students’ own writing that includes the use of sources (from  the Citation Project); and standardized test data (from ACT and others). This section can help you support students as they develop their abilities  in this area.

The central terms you will want to introduce are “critical reading,”  “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “primary vs. secondary sources,”  “bias,” “confirmation bias,” and “credibility.” You may have discussed  some of these already in class, but may want to present or review them in  the context of the more general goal of critical reading online. Of these concepts, probably the most difficult to discuss is bias. We’ve tried to give  readers a clear definition; even so, bias is hard to see, most notably when  the sites we look at agree with our own ideas. The news sites (see activity #3  below) will provide the most obvious examples of bias, but they are not the  only ones you might use. There is bias in science reporting(e.g., FoodBabe. com; mercola.com) and in plenty of other areas. Discussions of bias should focus carefully on the language that is used and on the “facts” that are presented. The lateral reading process we describe should help students apply critical reading strategies to help them recognize the bias in these sites and ultimately find quality information online.

Before you take students to the activities below and then on to their  individual projects, it might be useful to look together at a hoax site or two. The following are two examples, but there are many online that are  designated as such if you would prefer to choose your own:  

1. Buy Dehydrated Water: https://buydehydratedwatercom.weebly. com/

2. The Taxonomy of Barney: https://www.improbable.com/airchives/ paperair/volume1/v1i1/barney.htm

You might have students review these or other hoax sites by contrasting  them with their own favorite sites or your school’s site. Your goal in class  discussion should be to raise students’ awareness of ways in which information is presented online, whether true or false. These examples should help  students see why it will be useful for them to have critical reading skills for  their own work.  

With this background, you can move directly to lateral reading as a  strongly recommended approach to evaluating Web sources. Using the subject of an upcoming source-driven assignment as the focus, have students practice the steps of lateral reading as a class, in pairs, or in small  groups to give them hands-on experience with this process as they explore  sources on the assigned subject. Demonstrating the process and incorporating the additional tips we discuss (clicking hyperlinks, opening new  tabs, and moving deliberately around the Web) will set students up to follow the lateral reading process. Students might also want to keep a sort  of “lab notebook” of their Web searches with notes on the lateral reading  steps they follow in their individual projects to be submitted with their  final writing assignment.

Activities 

The following are four class activities that can help students apply and  practice what they learn in this chapter about assessing the credibility  of online sources. The first activity asks students to draw on their prior  knowledge, which helps lay the foundation for applying what may be new  knowledge.  

1. Reflect on your current reading practices as you are moving around the Web. Take notes on the following: How do you tend to move from one site to the next? Do you open new tabs? Follow hyperlinks? Do you move deliberately or haphazardly? What are you learning about yourself as a digital reader as you pay attention to your practices?
2. Access your institution’s library and peruse its databases, paying attention to the titles of the databases and any additional information offered about each. Make a list of at least three databases that contain primary sources and at least three that contain secondary sources. How can you tell the difference based on the titles and any information offered about the databases?
3. On a day when there is a major story in the world news, look at the following different news sites to see how the story is reported and presented, likely on the front page (or landing page) in order to notice how bias plays out in reporting on major news events:

• Al Jazeera (“US & Canada News”)

• New York Times

• The Washington Post

• BBC News

• CBC News

• The Jerusalem Post (“World News”)

What do you notice about how the story is represented? Where do you see bias? How do you know? Social media sites can also  give you a version of the news; evaluate what you see on your favorite site, comparing and contrasting it to what is on the news sites above.

4. Following the steps laid out in this section, read laterally about the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division in order to evaluate whether it is a credible scientific source about dihydrogen monoxide (“Dihydrogen Monoxide – DHMO Homepage”). Share and compare your notes and your evaluation with those of your classmates. What’s the consensus?