Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Reading

In rhetorical reading, the writer is supposed to be the creator of meaning and shape reality accordingly as compared to being passive and engaging only in receptive reading where he or she only gets meaning from the text without having an in-depth analysis of what the writer is trying to communicate to the reader. In this essay, I am going to apply Lakoff’s metaphorical analysis to Haas and Flower’s examples of readers. Metaphors We Live By The book, “Metaphors we live by” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson was written after the authors found an interest in metaphor. They felt concerned on how the Western philosophy treated meaning since they thought that metaphor had a lot to do with people’s lives and it was all going unnoticed. The book focuses on the structures which are mostly conceptual in nature and are responsible for how we think and interact with other people in our lives (Hart, 96).

Haas and Flower in their study, think aloud 1988 (Haas and Linda, 168), observed a great distinction in the rhetorical processes between the students. Students who were graduates used rhetorical reading strategies to help them interpret a passage whereas, first year students hardly employed such strategy. This test was among experienced readers (graduates) and average readers (first year students) focusing primarily on “rhetorical reading: constructing a rhetorical context for the text as a way of making sense of it. ” (Haas and Linda, 168) The reader should inculcate prior information and knowledge in the text to help create meaning of what the text is talking about and the information that the writer is trying to put across. We find that a reader builds meaning through a multifaceted, interwoven representations of knowledge (Haas and Linda, 168). We find that readers who employ contents strategy alone identifies the text structure and applies his or her own knowledge to read the text like in Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphorical analysis, they say that a metaphor is not merely a matter of language but of thought.

Conceptual metaphors consist of a system of related expressions, metaphorical in nature that are appearing on the linguistic surface. These readers’ goal is to get information from the text, solely, no where else. The most common method employed here is the paraphrasing technique (Hart, 95). Function/ Feature Strategy These kinds of readers have a pre-reading strategy to read through using acronyms especially those that can be remembered easily. Function / feature strategy is usually employed to name the text and the reader can get what the author is trying to say. Lakoff also talks about the conventional metaphors which are used to structure the ordinary concept of our culture as conceptualized by us. Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual “domain” influenced cognitive linguistics and they had a variety of concepts such as life, Money, War and Arguments among others.

Subsequent developments had an impact on the level of conceptual structure and metaphors alike. Rhetorical Strategies This strategy was employed by experienced readers in the Haas and Flower study. The truth is relative to how we conceptualize it and based mostly on our experiences, our culture and the physical environment. Rhetorical strategies are found to be of most importance because it provides information that is very rich (Haas and Linda, 176-177). The reader or student in this case not only understands the contents and features of the text but goes further to infer what the author is trying to say, his message and purpose. The student even creates an imaginative persona for the writer (Haas and Linda, 177). I find rhetorical reading to be a progressive enlargement and the larger picture of the meaning assigned to a text.

Teachers are tasked with helping students move from the information exchange system of view towards a rhetorical approach which is more comprehensive. Reading should be a constructive process rather than being a receptive affair. Students should be engaged in an active method which will mold them to be community members who are committed and contribute to the betterment of the community. References Ananda, Rizky.  The effectiveness of using thieves strategy in teaching reading of recount text (an experimental research with the eighth grade students of SMP Negeri 23 Semarang in the academic year of 2015/2016).