These Reading Summaries, in my opinion, served mainly as an auxiliary to the RWDs, in that, whereas the RWDs focused mainly on extracting the key point from the assigned reading, the Reading Summaries were meant to rephrase the main argument and the evidence the author used to support it. In this way, after analyzing a …
Category Archives: Reading Summary
Reading Summary 6
Author Stanley Fish concludes his book Winning Arguments with a chapter titled “Why We Can’t Get Along,” which serves as an overall summary of his main thesis on why human beings so often find themselves in argument. Fish begins by interpreting human culture through an argumentative lens. Some of the greatest surviving art of the …
Reading Summary 5
In chapter two of Winning Arguments, titled “Political Arguments,” author Stanley Fish goes in depth on the state of modern politics, namely, why political discourse is often extremely polarizing. The first reason Fish accredits for our divisive politics is the ever presence of spin agents: that is to say, orators who attempt to make their …
Reading Summary 4
In one chapter of Winning Arguments titled “Academic Arguments,” author Stanley Fish claims that the world of academic discourse, which attempts to give the appearance of presenting facts in an unbiased and opinionated manner, is in fact beholden to an unwritten decorum. He theorizes that modern academics have formed an “interpretive community,” defined as a …
Reading Summary 3
In her essay “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar,” Anne Curzan argues that the way schools teach English to students is fundamentally flawed, in that it insists invariably on a set of arbitrarily selected and enforced rules. According to Curzan, this type of language, which she refers to as Standard English, discorages …
Reading Summary 2
In his essay “Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction,” Richard Rorty argues that the philosophical trend of searching for a supposedly purer form of existence – or as he calls it “Reality with a capital R” (67) – is flawed and unnecessary. His reasoning is that the overwhelming majority of the world pays no heed …
Reading Summary 1
Casey Boyle argues in his article “…something like a reading ethics…” that there are fundamental flaws in the way that schoolchildren are taught to read through academic texts. Specifically, people are taught to read “in only one moment of our lives with only one type of material and in only one way” (Boyle), that being, …
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“While most people believe that there can be an end to arguments based on the belief of objective reality , my essay will apply to Fish’s concept of a world where what we believe to be fact is based on our fallible perceptions, to show that people will always find themselves in argument in every single …