Journal 11—What’s Motivating This Writer?
In this chapter, the authors discuss how readers often find difficulty in deciphering an author’s point of view and their main argument. In the beginning, the authors talk about how, within a classroom setting, students find it difficult to pull out the exact argument of a set of text as it may undermine their own opinions, the opinions of those around them, and the uncertainty of hitting the opinion of the author them self, head-on. A different approach that the authors of this book discuss are to look at different arguments that the writer could be responding to. Also, being mindful of what the author is disagreeing with or perhaps agreeing with, the motivations of the writer, differing ideas encountered within the text, etc. I find that this method is more fruitful as the reader can hit many different points of the text. Carving around the actual argument of the text can give the reader a richer idea of what the author has in mind, and thus finding the argument in light of contextual clues set in the text. I can also relate to this method of finding an argument. Whenever I’m specifically asked, “What is the author trying to argue about here?” or “What is the author’s viewpoint on ___,” I have trouble finding the correct thing to say. I’m not in the author’s head, nor do I know the author personally (however, that would be pretty cool.) I find it easier to go around the question of “what is the argument?” and instead try to support the question with contextual clues.
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