Introduction:

Reading Goals and the Standards

     When you have completed Units 1 and 2, you will have experienced and explored readability criteria as malleable, often mutually informing systems that change with the individual reader-audience and individual reader's goals.

     Thus it is useful to visualize the three components that influence the reading process -- the text, the reader-audience, and the reading goals -- as a triad of meaning, diagrammed as a triangle.  Any of its vertices (any of the major components in the reading process) can be emphasized by being rotated into the apex slot.  That is, when a particular standard is applied to a reading outcome, the apex of that triangle will change to reflect an altered relationship among a text, its reader-audience, and the reading goals applied to it.  The triangle model can, then, aid us in demonstrating how the Standards point at different possible emphases that can be prioritized and evaluated within the reading process.  The Standards set different goals that can alter what a reader-audience will define as a successful outcome in reading a text.

Standards and Focus

     These Standards offer different visions of how a text can be read and what it can be read for.  For example, a text can be read for information -- for the information that a particular audience-reader wants to gain.  Such a goal is defined as part of the communication standard.  The reader is put in charge of what will be gleaned from a text, searching out information in order to express it or use it in a public forum for his or her own purposes.  When a focus on a text's information (as opposed to its structure, or its meaning for a particular audience) drives a reading, the dominance relationship among the triangle's vertices shifts.


 COMMUNICATION STANDARDS
 CONNECTION STANDARDS
 CULTURE STANDARDS
 COMPARISONS STANDARDS
 COMMUNITIES STANDARDS

 
INTRODUCTION TO EXERCISES