Analysis Of Haas And Flower

Haas and Flower created an interesting point when I read “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning “. In the reading, Haas and Flower, provided multiple propositions to apply, however a key one certainly caught my eye. Haas and Flower proposed various arguments, yet their main idea implied that there needs to be an increase in rhetorical reading. I came to the conclusion that increasing rhetorical reading was their main point due to a statement in the text. “We would like to help extend this constructive, rhetorical view of reading, which we share with others in the field…” [Haas and Flower, 167] the following statement blandly states their intention to spread an important strategy, reading rhetorically, among community.

Haas and Flower then provide an example [Page 177], of the differences of a student reader and an experienced reader. The example shows a remarkable difference between the two, the student reader was able to identify the situation and paraphrased what he found out. The experienced reader not only identified the situation, but provided a theory to attempt to explain what the author was trying to do; this is quite different than what the student reader provided. I believe Haas and Flower added the example to emphasize the difference of the conclusions that the student reader and the experienced reader came to. By adding the example, Haas and Flower were also able to support rhetorical reading and the difference it made between the readers. Haas and Flower then state the following: “While the student reader is mainly creating a gist and paraphrasing, the experienced reader does this and more – he then tries to infer the author’s purpose and even creates a sort of strident persona for the writer” [Haas and Flower, 177] The following quote is basically the description of the experiment, and explains the difference in the student reader’s response to the experienced reader’s

For example, in episode 4, 25% of the experienced readers recognized the idea, while none the student readers were able to identify it. This shows that early in the study, already 25% of the experienced readers found the idea due to their knowledge and skills with rhetorical reading. This also supports the ideas that students should be introduced to rhetorical reading to be able to effectively discover the hidden ideas like the experienced readers. Later in the experiment, by episode 7, all experienced readers were able to identify the idea while the student readers still were not able to figure it out, this continued all the way until episode 8. In the experiment, more experienced readers were able to figure out the idea each episode while the student readers had no clue what it was until episode 8. With all the studies and experiments, I deem this study effective by proving rhetorical reading should be introduced to student readers. However, in the opposite side, one could argue that the experiments are ineffective because there is no proof that there is a variety in ethnicity and region, this could disprove the data because it could have been rigged to only include a certain