A first amendment junkie pdf

Critical Reading: Getting Started

Some books are to be tasted, others to be chewed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

— FRANCIS BACON

ACTIVE READING

In the passage that we quote at the top of this page, Bacon makes at least two good points. One is that books are of varying worth; the second is that a taste of some books may be enough.

But even a book (or an essay) that you will chew and digest is one that you first may want to taste. How can you get a taste—that is, how can you get some sense of a piece of writing before you sit down to read it carefully?

Previewing Even before you read a work, you may have some ideas about it, perhaps because you already know something about the author. You know, for example, that a work by Martin Luther King Jr. will probably deal with civil rights. You know, too, that it will be serious and eloquent. On the other hand, if you pick up an essay by Woody Allen, you will probably expect it to be amusing. It may be serious— Allen has written earnestly about many topics, especially those con- cerned with the media—but it’s your hunch that the essay will be at least somewhat entertaining and probably will not be terribly diffi- cult to understand. In short, a reader who has some knowledge of

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the author probably has some idea of what the writing will be like, and so the reader reads it in a certain mood. Admittedly, most of the authors represented in this book are not widely known, but we give biographical notes that may provide you with some sense of what to expect.

The place of publication may also tell you something about the essay. For instance, the National Review is a conservative jour- nal. If you notice that an essay on affirmative action was published in the National Review, you are probably safe in tentatively assum- ing that the essay will not endorse affirmative action. On the other hand, Ms. Magazine is a liberal publication, and an essay on affir- mative action published in Ms. will probably be an endorsement.

The title of an essay, too, may give you an idea of what to expect. Of course, a title may announce only the subject and not the author’s thesis or point of view (“On Gun Control,” “Should Drugs Be Legal?”), but fairly often it will indicate the thesis too, as in “Give Children the Vote” and “Gay Marriages: Make Them Legal.” Knowing more or less what to expect, you can probably take in some of the major points even on a quick reading.

Skimming: Finding the Thesis Although most of the material in this book is too closely argued to be fully understood by merely skimming, still, skimming can tell you a good deal. Read the first paragraph of an essay carefully because it may announce the author’s thesis (chief point, major claim), and it may give you some sense of how the argument for that thesis will be conducted. (What we call the thesis can also be called the main idea, the point, or even the argument, but in this book we use argument to refer not only to the thesis statement but also to the entire development of the thesis in the essay.) Run your eye over the rest, looking for key expressions that indicate the author’s conclusions, such as “It follows, then, that . . .” Passages of this sort often occur as the first or last sentence in a paragraph. And of course, pay attention to any headings within the text. Finally, pay special attention to the last paragraph because it probably will offer a summary and a brief restatement of the writer’s thesis.

Having skimmed the work, you probably know the author’s thesis, and you may detect the author’s methods—for instance, whether the author supports the thesis chiefly by personal experi- ence, by statistics, or by ridiculing the opposition. You also have a clear idea of the length and some idea of the difficulty of the piece.

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You know, then, whether you can read it carefully now before din- ner or whether you had better put off a careful reading until you have more time.

Reading with a Pencil: Underlining, Highlighting, Annotating Once you have a general idea of the work—not only an idea of its topic and thesis but also a sense of the way in which the thesis is argued—you can then go back and start reading it carefully.

As you read, underline or highlight key passages, and make annotations in the margins (but not in library books, please). Because you are reading actively, or interacting with the text, you will not simply let your eye rove across the page.

• You will underline or highlight what seem to be the chief points, so that later when you review the essay you can eas- ily locate the main passages.

• But don’t overdo a good thing. If you find yourself underlin- ing or highlighting most of a page, you are probably not thinking carefully enough about what the key points are.

• Similarly, your marginal annotations should be brief and selective. They will probably consist of hints or clues, things like “really?,” “doesn’t follow,” “good,” “compare with Jones,” and “check this.”

• In short, in a paragraph you might underline or highlight a key definition, and in the margin you might write “good,” or, “on the other hand,” “?” if you think the definition is fuzzy or wrong.

You are interacting with the text and laying the groundwork for eventually writing your own essay on what you have read.

What you annotate will depend largely on your purpose. If you are reading an essay in order to see the ways in which the writer organizes an argument, you will annotate one sort of thing. If you are reading in order to challenge the thesis, you will anno- tate other things. Here is a passage from an essay entitled “On Racist Speech,” with a student’s rather skeptical, even aggressive annotations. But notice that at least one of the annotations— “Definition of ‘fighting words’”—apparently was made chiefly in order to remind the reader of where an important term appears in the essay. The essay is by Charles R. Lawrence III, a professor of law at Georgetown University. It originally appeared in the Chronicle of

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Higher Education (October 25, 1989), a publication read chiefly by college and university faculty members and administrators.

University officials who have formulated policies to respond to incidents of racial harassment have been characterized in the press as “thought police,” but such policies generally do noth- ing more than impose sanctions against intentional face-to- face insults. When racist speech takes the form of face-to-face insults, catcalls, or other assaultive speech aimed at an individ- ual or small group of persons, it falls directly within the “fight- ing words” exception to First Amendment protection. The Supreme Court has held that words which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are not protected by the First Amendment.

If the purpose of the First Amendment is to foster the greatest amount of speech, racial insults disserve that purpose. Assaultive racist speech functions as a preemptive strike. The invective is experienced as a blow, not as a proffered idea, and once the blow is struck, it is unlikely that a dialogue will follow. Racial insults are particularly undeserving of First Amendment protection because the perpetrator’s intention is not to discover truth or initiate dialogue but to injure the victim. In most situations, members of minority groups realize that they are likely to lose if they respond to epithets by fight- ing and are forced to remain silent and submissive.

“This; Therefore, That” To arrive at a coherent thought or a coherent series of thoughts that will lead to a reasonable conclusion, a writer has to go through a good deal of preliminary effort. On page 13 we talked about pat- terns of thought that stimulate the generation of specific ideas. The path to sound conclusions involves similar thought patterns that carry forward the arguments presented in the essay:

• While these arguments are convincing, they fail to consider . . .

• While these arguments are convincing, they must also consider . . .

• These arguments, rather than being convincing, instead prove . . .

• While these authors agree, in my opinion . . .

• Although it is often true that . . .

All of these patterns can serve as heuristics or prompts—that is, they can stimulate the creation of ideas.

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Example of such a policy?

Example?

? What about sexist speech?

Definition of “fighting words”

Why must speech always seek “to discover truth”?

Really? Probably depends on the individual.

How does he know?

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And if the writer is to convince the reader that the conclusion is sound, the reasoning that led to the conclusion must be set forth in detail, with a good deal of “This; therefore, that”; If this, then that”; and “It might be objected at this point that . . .” The argu- ments in this book require more comment than President Calvin Coolidge provided when his wife, who hadn’t been able to go to church on a Sunday, asked him what the preacher’s sermon was about. “Sin,” he said. His wife persisted: “What did the preacher say about it?” Coolidge’s response: “He was against it.”

But, again, when we say that most of the arguments in this book are presented at length and require careful reading, we do not mean that they are obscure; we mean, rather, that the reader has to take the sentences thoughtfully, one by one. And speaking of one by one, we are reminded of an episode in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass:

“Can you do Addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.” “She can’t do Addition,” the Red Queen said.

It’s easy enough to add one and one and one and so on, and Alice can, of course, do addition, but not at the pace that the White Queen sets. Fortunately, you can set your own pace in reading the cumulative thinking set forth in the essays we reprint. Skimming won’t work, but slow reading—and thinking about what you are reading—will.

When you first pick up an essay, you may indeed want to skim it, for some of the reasons mentioned on page 31, but sooner or later you have to settle down to read it and to think about it. The effort will be worthwhile. John Locke, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, said,

Reading furnishes the mind with materials of knowledge; it is thinking [that] makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment.

First, Second, and Third Thoughts Suppose you are reading an argument about pornographic pictures. For the present purpose, it doesn’t matter whether the argument

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favors or opposes censorship. As you read the argument, ask your- self whether pornography has been adequately defined. Has the writer taken the trouble to make sure that the reader and the writer are thinking about the same thing? If not, the very topic under discussion has not been adequately fixed; and therefore fur- ther debate over the issue may well be so unclear as to be futile. How, then, ought a topic such as this be defined for effective critical thinking?

It goes without saying that pornography can’t be defined simply as pictures of nude figures or even of nude figures copulating, for such a definition would include not only photographs taken for medical, sociological, and scientific purposes but also some of the world’s great art. Nobody seriously thinks that such images should be called pornography.

Is it enough, then, to say that pornography “stirs lustful thoughts” or “appeals to prurient interests”? No, because pictures of shoes probably stir lustful thoughts in shoe fetishists, and pic- tures of children in ads for underwear probably stir lustful thoughts in pedophiles. Perhaps, then, the definition must be amended to “material that stirs lustful thoughts in the average person.” But will this restatement do? First, it may be hard to agree on the char- acteristics of “the average person.” In other matters, the law often does assume that there is such a creature as “the reasonable per- son,” and most people would agree that in a given situation there might be a reasonable response—for almost everyone. But we can- not be so sure that the same is true about the emotional responses of this “average person.” In any case, far from stimulating sexual impulses, sadomasochistic pictures of booted men wielding whips on naked women probably turn off “the average person,” yet this is the sort of material that most people would agree is pornographic.

Something must be wrong, then, with the definition that pornography is material that “stirs lustful thoughts in the average person.” We began with a definition that was too broad (“pictures of nude figures”), but now we have a definition that is too narrow. We must go back to the drawing board. This is not nitpicking. The label “average person” was found to be inadequate in a pornogra- phy case argued before the Supreme Court; because the materials in question were aimed at a homosexual audience, it was agreed that the average person would not find them sexually stimulating.