Becoming an Active Reader Reading critically means being an active rather than a passive reader. Being an active reader means participating in the reading process by taking the time to preview a source and then to read it carefully, highlighting and annotating it. This process will prepare you to discuss the source with others and to respond in writing to what you have read.
Previewing
When you approach an argument for the first time, you preview it, skimming the argument to help you form a general impression of the writer’s position on the issue, the argument’s key supporting points, and the context for the writer’s remarks.
Begin by looking at the title, the first paragraph (which often contains a thesis statement or overview), and the last paragraph (which often includes a concluding statement or a summary of the writer’s key points). Also look at the topic sentences of the essay’s body paragraphs. In addition, note any headings, words set in boldface or italic type, and bulleted or numbered lists in the body of the argument. If the argument includes visuals—charts, tables, graphs, photos, and so on—look at them as well. Finally, if an argument includes a headnote or background on the author or on the text, be sure to read this material. It can help you to understand the context in which the author is writing.
When you have finished previewing the argument, you should have a good general sense of what the writer wants to communicate.
Now, you are ready to read through the argument more carefully. As you read, look for words and phrases that help to shape the structure of the argument and signal the arrangement of the writer’s ideas. These words and phrases will help you understand the flow of ideas as well as the content and emphasis of the argument.
EXERCISE 2.1 “Violent Media Is Good for Kids” is an essay by Gerard Jones, a comic book writer and author of several books about popular media. In this essay, which begins on the following page, Jones argues that violent comic books and video games serve a useful function for young people.
GERARD JONES VIOLENT MEDIA IS GOOD FOR KIDS At 13 I was alone and afraid. Taught by my well-meaning, progressive, English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that rage was something to be overcome and cooperation was always better than conflict, I suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a nice-boy persona. Placed in a small, experimental school that was wrong for me, afraid to join my peers in their bumptious rush into adolescent boyhood, I withdrew into passivity and loneliness. My parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960s, built a wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture.1
A scene from Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs’s comic book Monsters from Outer Space .
© Gerard Jones, Gene Ha, Will Jacobs
Then the Incredible Hulk smashed through it.2
One of my mother’s students convinced her that Marvel Comics, despite their apparent juvenility and violence, were in fact devoted to lofty messages of pacifism and tolerance. My mother borrowed some, thinking they’d be good for me. And so they were. But not because they preached lofty messages of benevolence. They were good for me because they were juvenile. And violent.3
The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk: overgendered and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging against a frightened world that misunderstood and persecuted him. Suddenly I had a fantasy self to carry my stifled rage and buried desire for power. I had a fantasy self who was a self: unafraid of his desires and the world’s disapproval, unhesitating and effective in action. “Puny boy follow Hulk!” roared my fantasy self, and I followed.4
I followed him to new friends—other sensitive geeks chasing their own inner brutes—and I followed him to the arrogant, self-exposing, self-assertive, superheroic decision to become a writer. Eventually, I left him behind, followed more sophisticated heroes, and finally my own lead along a twisting path to a career and an identity. In my 30s, I found myself writing action movies and 5
I have watched my son living the same story—transforming himself into a bloodthirsty dinosaur to embolden himself for the plunge into preschool, a Power Ranger to muscle through a social competition in kindergarten. In the first grade, his friends started climbing a tree at school. But he was afraid: of falling, of the centipedes crawling on the trunk, of sharp branches, of his friends’ derision. I took my cue from his own fantasies and read him old Tarzan comics, rich in combat and bright with flashing knives. For two weeks he lived in them. Then he put them aside. And he climbed the tree.6
But all the while, especially in the wake of the recent burst of school shootings, I heard pop psychologists insisting that violent stories are harmful to kids, heard teachers begging parents to keep their kids away from “junk culture,” heard a guilt-stricken friend with a son who loved Pokémon lament, “I’ve turned into the bad mom who lets her kid eat sugary cereal and watch cartoons!”7
A scene from Gerard Jones and Gene Ha’s comic book Oktane .
© Gerard Jones, Gene Ha, Will Jacobs.
That’s when I started the research.8
“Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of our selves that we try not to experience in our lives but often want, even need, to experience vicariously through stories of others,” writes Melanie Moore, Ph.D., a psychologist who works with urban teens. “Children need violent entertainment in order to explore the inescapable feelings that they’ve been taught to deny, and to re-integrate those feelings into a more whole, more complex, more resilient selfhood.”9
Moore consults to public schools and local governments, and is also raising a daughter. For the past three years she and I have been studying the ways in which children use violent stories to meet their emotional and developmental needs—and the ways in which adults can help them use those stories healthily. With her help I developed Power Play , a program for helping young people improve their self-knowledge and sense of potency through heroic, combative storytelling.10
We’ve found that every aspect of even the trashiest pop-culture story can have its own developmental function. Pretending to have superhuman powers 11
At its most fundamental level, what we call “creative violence”—head-bonking cartoons, bloody video games, playground karate, toy guns—gives children a tool to master their rage. Children will feel rage. Even the sweetest and most civilized of them, even those whose parents read the better class of literary magazines, will feel rage. The world is uncontrollable and incomprehensible; mastering it is a terrifying, enraging task. Rage can be an energizing emotion, a shot of courage to push us to resist greater threats, take more control, than we ever thought we could. But rage is also the emotion our culture distrusts the most. Most of us are taught early on to fear our own. Through immersion in imaginary combat and identification with a violent protagonist, children engage the rage they’ve stifled, come to fear it less, and become more capable of utilizing it against life’s challenges.12
I knew one little girl who went around exploding with fantasies so violent that other moms would draw her mother aside to whisper, “I think you should know something about Emily….” Her parents were separating, and she was small, an only child, a tomboy at an age when her classmates were dividing sharply along gender lines. On the playground she acted out Sailor Moon° fights, and in the classroom she wrote stories about people being stabbed with knives. The more adults tried to control her stories, the more she acted out the roles of her angry heroes: breaking rules, testing limits, roaring threats.13
Then her mother and I started helping her tell her stories. She wrote them, performed them, drew them like comics: sometimes bloody, sometimes tender, always blending the images of pop culture with her own most private fantasies. She came out of it just as fiery and strong, but more self-controlled and socially competent: a leader among her peers, the one student in her class who could truly pull boys and girls together.14
The title character of Oktane gets nasty.
© Gerard Jones, Gene Ha, Will Jacobs.
I worked with an older girl, a middle-class “nice girl,” who held herself together through a chaotic family situation and a tumultuous adolescence with gangsta rap. In the mythologized street violence of Ice T, the rage and strutting of his music and lyrics, she found a theater of the mind in which she could 15
I’m not going to argue that violent entertainment is harmless. I think it has helped inspire some people to real-life violence. I am going to argue that it’s helped hundreds of people for every one it’s hurt, and that it can help far more if we learn to use it well. I am going to argue that our fear of “youth violence” isn’t well-founded on reality, and that the fear can do more harm than the reality. We act as though our highest priority is to prevent our children from growing up into murderous thugs—but modern kids are far more likely to grow up too passive, too distrustful of themselves, too easily manipulated.16
We send the message to our children in a hundred ways that their craving for imaginary gun battles and symbolic killings is wrong, or at least dangerous. Even when we don’t call for censorship or forbid Mortal Kombat , we moan to other parents within our kids’ earshot about the “awful violence” in the entertainment they love. We tell our kids that it isn’t nice to play-fight, or we steer them from some monstrous action figure to a pro-social doll. Even in the most progressive households, where we make such a point of letting children feel what they feel, we rush to substitute an enlightened discussion for the raw material of rageful fantasy. In the process, we risk confusing them about their natural aggression in the same way the Victorians° confused their children about their sexuality. When we try to protect our children from their own feelings and fantasies, we shelter them not against violence but against power and selfhood.17
The people who lived during the reign of Victoria (1819–1901), queen of Great Britain and Ireland, who are often associated with prudish behavior.
Identifying the Elements of Argument
What is Jones’s thesis? Restate it in your own words.
What arguments does Jones present as evidence in support of his thesis?
What arguments against his position does Jones identify? How does he refute them?
Paraphrase Jones’s concluding statement.
Highlighting
After you read an argument, read through it again, this time highlighting as you read. When you highlight highlighting does not necessarily refer to the underlining done with a yellow highlighter pen.) This active reading strategy will help you to understand the writer’s ideas and to see connections among those ideas when you reread.
How do you know what to highlight? As a general rule, you look for the same signals that you looked for when you read the essay the first time—for example, the essay’s thesis and topic sentences and the words
JOHN LEO WHEN LIFE IMITATES VIDEO Los Angeles Times reported, “the Postal , and, in fact, the only way to end it.1
Did the sensibilities created by the modern, video kill games play a role in the Littleton massacre? Apparently so. Note the cool and casual cruelty, the outlandish arsenal of weapons, the cheering and laughing while hunting down victims one by one. All of this seems to reflect the style and feel of the video killing games they played so often.2
No, there isn’t any direct connection between most murderous games and most murders. And yes, the primary responsibility for protecting children from dangerous games lies with their parents, many of whom like to blame the entertainment industry for their own failings.3
But there is a cultural problem here: We are now a society in which the chief form of play for millions of youngsters is making large numbers of people die. Hurting and maiming others is the central fun activity in video games played so addictively by the young. A widely cited survey of 900 fourth- through eighth-grade students found that almost half of the children said their favorite electronic games involve violence. Can it be that all this constant training in make-believe killing has no social effects? 4
Dress rehearsal. The conventional argument is that this is a harmless activity among children who know the difference between fantasy and reality. But the games are often played by unstable youngsters unsure about the difference. Many of these have been maltreated or rejected and left alone most of the time (a precondition for playing the games obsessively). Adolescent feelings of resentment, powerlessness, and revenge pour into the killing games. In these children, the games can become a dress rehearsal for the real thing.5
Psychologist David Grossman of Arkansas State University, a retired Army officer, thinks “point and shoot” video games have the same effect as military strategies used to break down a soldier’s aversion to killing. During World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of all American soldiers fired their weapon in battle. Shooting games in which the target is a man-shaped outline, the Army found, made recruits more willing to “make killing a reflex action.”6
Head shots pay a bonus in many video games. Now the Marine Corps is adapting a version of Doom , the hyperviolent game played by one of the Littleton killers, for its own training purposes.7
More realistic touches in video games help blur the boundary between fantasy and reality —guns carefully modeled on real ones, accurate-looking wounds, screams, and other sound effects, even the recoil of a heavy rifle. Some newer games seem intent on erasing children’s empathy and concern for others. Once the intended victims of video slaughter were mostly gangsters or aliens. Now some games invite players to blow away ordinary people who 8
But the bottom line is that the young are being invited to enjoy the killing of vulnerable people picked at random. This looks like the final lesson in a course to eliminate any lingering resistance to killing.9
SWAT teams and cops now turn up as the intended victims of some video-game killings. This has the effect of exploiting resentments toward law enforcement and making real-life shooting of cops more likely. This sensibility turns up in the hit movie Matrix : world-saving hero Keanu Reeves, in a mandatory Goth-style, long black coat packed with countless heavy-duty guns, is forced to blow away huge numbers of uniformed law-enforcement people.10
Pilots train on flight simulators, drivers on driv-ing simulators, and now we have our children on murder simulators.” If we want to avoid more Littleton-style massacres, we will begin taking the social effects of the killing games more seriously.11
EXERCISE 2.2 Look carefully at Katherine Choi’s highlighting of John Leo’s essay on pages 68 –70 . How would your own highlighting of this essay be similar to or different from hers?
EXERCISE 2.3 Reread “Violent Media Is Good for Kids” (pp. 64 –67 ). As you read, high light the essay by underlining and starring important points, boxing or circling key words, writing question marks beside references that need further explanation, or drawing lines and arrows to connect related ideas.
Annotating
As you highlight, you should also annotate what you are reading. annotating
As you read an argument and think critically about what you are reading, use the questions in the following checklist to help you make useful annotations.
pages 68 –70 , also include her marginal annotations. In these annotations, Choi put Leo’s thesis and some of his key points into her own words and recorded a few questions that she intended to explore further. She also added notes to clarify his references to two iconic school shootings. Finally, she identified arguments against Leo’s position and his refutation of these arguments.
JOHN LEO WHEN LIFE IMITATES VIDEO Marching through a large building using various bombs and guns to pick off victims is a conventional video-game scenario. In the Colorado massacre, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris used pistol-grip shotguns, as in some video-arcade games. The pools of blood, screams of agony, and pleas for mercy must have been familiar—they are featured in some of the newer and more realistic kill-for-kicks games. “With each kill,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “the teens cackled and shouted as though playing one of the morbid video games they loved.” And they ended their spree by shooting themselves in the head, the final act in the game Postal , and, in fact, the only way to end it.1
Did the sensibilities created by the modern, video kill games play a role in the Littleton massacre? Apparently so. Note the cool and casual cruelty, the outlandish arsenal of weapons, the cheering and laughing while hunting down victims one by one. All of this seems to reflect the style and feel of the video killing games they played so often.2
No, there isn’t any direct connection between most murderous games and most murders. And yes, the primary responsibility for protecting children from dangerous games lies with their parents, many of whom like to blame the entertainment industry for their own failings.3
Refutation
True?
Date of survey?
(He means “training” does have negative effects, right?)
But there is a cultural problem here: We are now a society in which the chief form of play for millions of youngsters is making large numbers of people die. Hurting and maiming others is the central fun activity in video games played so addictively by the young. A widely cited survey of 900 fourth- through eighth-grade students found that almost half of the children said their favorite electronic games involve violence. Can it be that all this constant training in make-believe killing has no social effects? 4
Opposing argument
Refutation
Dress rehearsal. The conventional argument is that this is a harmless activity among children who know the difference between fantasy and reality. But the games are often played by unstable youngsters unsure about the dif ference. Many of these have been maltreated or rejected and left alone most of the time (a precondition for playing the games obsessively). Adolescent feelings of resentment, powerlessness, and revenge pour into the killing games. In these children, the games can become a dress rehearsal for the real thing.5
Psychologist David Grossman of Arkansas State University, a retired Army officer, thinks “point and shoot” video games have the same effect as military strategies used to break down a soldier’s aversion to killing. During World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of all American soldiers fired their weapon in battle. Shooting games in which the target is a man-shaped outline, the Army found, made recruits more willing to “make killing a reflex action.”6
Video games are much more powerful versions of the military’s primitive discovery about overcoming the reluctance to shoot. Grossman says Michael Carneal, the schoolboy shooter in Paducah, Ky., showed the effects of video-game lessons in killing. Carneal coolly shot nine times, hitting eight people, five of them in the head or neck. Head shots pay a bonus in many video games. Now the Marine Corps is adapting a version of Doom , the hyperviolent game played by one of the Littleton killers, for its own training purposes.7
More realistic touches in video games help blur the boundary between fantasy and reality —guns carefully modeled on real ones, accurate-looking wounds, screams, and other sound effects, even the recoil of a heavy rifle. Some newer games seem intent on erasing children’s empathy and concern for others. Once the intended victims of video slaughter were mostly gangsters or aliens. Now some games invite players to blow away ordinary people who have done nothing wrong—pedestrians, marching bands, an elderly woman with a walker. In these games, the shooter is not a hero, just a violent sociopath. 8
But the bottom line is that the young are being invited to enjoy the killing of vulnerable people picked at random. This looks like the final lesson in a course to eliminate any lingering resistance to killing.9
SWAT teams and cops now turn up as the intended victims of some video-game killings. This has the effect of exploiting resentments toward law enforcement and making real-life shooting of cops more likely. This sensibility turns up in the hit movie Matrix : world-saving hero Keanu Reeves, in a mandatory Goth-style, long black coat packed with countless heavy-duty guns, is forced to blow away huge numbers of uniformed law-enforcement people.10
“Pilots train on flight simulators, drivers on driv-ing simulators, and now we have our children on murder simulators.” If we want to avoid more Littleton-style massacres, we will begin taking the social effects of the killing games more seriously.11
EXERCISE 2.4 Reread Gerard Jones’s “Violent Media Is Good for Kids” (pp. 64 –67 ). As you read, refer to the “Questions for Annotating” checklist (p. 71 ), and use them as a guide as you write your own reactions and questions in the margins of Jones’s essay. In your annotations, note where you agree or disagree with Jones, and briefly explain why. Quickly summarize any points that you think are particularly important. Look up any unfamiliar words or references you have identified, and write down brief definitions or explanations. Think about these annotations as you prepare to discuss the Jones essay in class (and, eventually, to write about it).
EXERCISE 2.5 Exchange books with another student, and read his or her highlighting and annotating. How are your written responses similar to the other student’s? How are they different? Do your classmate’s responses help you to see anything new about Jones’s essay?
EXERCISE 2.6 The following letter to the editor of a college newspaper takes a position on the issue of how violent media—in this case, video games—influence young people. Read the letter, highlighting and annotating it.
pp. 64 –67 ). First, identify the writer’s thesis, and restate it in your own words. Then, consider the benefits of the violent video games the writer identifies. Are these benefits the same as those Jones identifies?
In paragraph 4, the writer summarizes arguments against her position. Does Jones address any of these same arguments? If so, does he refute them in the same way this writer does? Finally, read the letter’s last paragraph. How is this writer’s purpose for writing different from Jones’s?
JESSICA ROBBINS DON’T WITHHOLD VIOLENT GAMES Entertainment and technology have changed. Video games today are more graphic and violent than they were a few years ago. There is a concern about children being influenced by the content of some of these video games. Some states have already passed laws which ban minors from the viewing or purchasing of these video games without an accompanying adult. I believe this law should not exist.1
Today’s technology has truly enriched our entertainment experience. Today’s computer and game consoles are able to simulate shooting, killing, mutilation, and blood through video games. It was such a problem that in 1993 Congress passed a law prohibiting the sale or rental of adult video games to minors. A rating system on games, similar to that placed on movies, was put into place, which I support. This helps to identify the level of violence that a game might have. However, I do not believe that this rating should restrict people of any age from purchasing a game.2
Currently there is no significant evidence that supports the argument that violent video games are a major contributing factor in criminal and violent behavior. Recognized universities such as MIT and UCLA described the law as misguided, citing that “most studies and experiments on video games containing violent content have not found adverse effects.” In addition, there actually are benefits from playing video games. They provide a safe outlet for aggression and frustration, increased attention performance, along with spatial and coordination skills.3
4
Major software companies who create video games should write Congress and protest this law on the basis of a nonexistent correlation between violence and video games. If the law is modified to not restrict these games to a particular age group, then these products will not be unfairly singled out.5
EXERCISE 2.7 The following document, a statement on media violence released by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2015, includes a list of specific recommendations. What position does this document take? Draft a thesis statement that summarizes this position. Then, consider how Gerard Jones (pp. 64 –67 ) would respond to this thesis—and to the APA’s specific recommendations.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION VIOLENCE IN MASS MEDIA On the recommendation of the Board of Directors and the Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest, Council voted to adopt the following resolution, as amended, as APA policy, replacing the 1985 resolution on television violence:1
Whereas the consequences of aggressive and violent behavior have brought human suffering, lost lives, and economic hardship to our society as well as an atmosphere of anxiety, fear, and mistrust;2
Whereas in recent years the level of violence in American society and the level of violence portrayed in television, film, and video have escalated markedly;3
Whereas the great majority of research studies have found a relation between viewing mass media violence and behaving aggressively;4
Whereas the conclusion drawn on the basis of over 30 years of research and a sizeable number of experimental and field investigations (Huston, et al., 1992; NIMH, 1982; Surgeon General, 1972) is that viewing mass media violence leads to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behavior, particularly in children, and has a long-lasting effect on behavior and personality, including criminal behavior;5
Whereas viewing violence desensitizes the viewer to violence, resulting in calloused attitudes regarding violence toward others and a decreased likelihood to take action on behalf of a victim when violence occurs;6
Whereas viewing violence increases viewers’ tendencies for becoming involved with or exposing themselves to violence;7
Whereas viewing violence increases fear of becoming a victim of violence, with a resultant increase in self-protective behaviors and mistrust of others;8
Whereas many children’s television programs and films contain some form of violence, and children’s access to adult-oriented media violence is increasing as a result of new technological advances;9
Therefore be it resolved that the American Psychological Association:10
urges psychologists to inform the television and film industry personnel who are responsible for violent programming, their commercial advertisers, legislators, and the general public that viewing violence in the media produces aggressive and violent behavior in children who are susceptible to such effects;
encourages parents and other child care providers to monitor and supervise television, video, and film viewing by children;
supports the inclusion of clear and easy-to-use warning labels for violent material in television, video, and film programs to enable viewers to make informed choices;
supports the development of technologies that empower viewers to prevent the broadcast of violent material in their homes;
supports the development, implementation, and evaluation of school-based programs to educate children and youth regarding means for critically viewing, processing, and evaluating video and film portrayals of both aggressive and prosocial behaviors;
requests the television and film industry to reduce direct violence in “real life” fictional children’s programming or violent incidents in cartoons and other television or film productions, and to provide more programming designed to mitigate possible effects of television and film violence, consistent with the guarantees of the First Amendment;
urges the television and film industry to foster programming that models prosocial behaviors and seeks to resolve the problem of violence in society;
offers to the television and film industry assistance in developing programs that illustrate psychological methods to control aggressive and violent behavior, and alternative strategies for dealing with conflict and anger;
supports revision of the Film Rating System to take into account violence content that is harmful to children and youth;
urges industry, government, and private foundations to develop and implement programs to enhance the critical viewing skills of teachers, parents, and children regarding media violence and how to prevent its negative effects;
recommends that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) review, as a condition for license renewal, the programming and outreach efforts and accomplishments of television stations in helping to solve the problem of youth violence;
urges industry, government, and private foundations to support research activities aimed at the amelioration of the effects of high levels of mass media violence on children’s attitudes and behavior (DeLeon, 1995).
Here is how a student, Katherine Choi, highlighted the essay “When Life Imitates Video” by John Leo, which appears below. Choi was preparing to write an essay about the effects of media violence on children and adolescents. She began her highlighting by underlining and starring the thesis statement (para. 2). She then circled references to Leo’s two key examples, “Colorado massacre” (1) and “Paducah, Ky.” (7) and placed question marks beside them to remind herself to find out more about them. In addition, she underlined and starred some particularly important points (2, 8, 9) as well as what she identified as the essay’s concluding statement (11).