Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

1.4 Starting your reading with questions
Unit 1 Asking questions as a way into reading
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

If, when you first engage with a given text, you instantly see interesting features or details and have interpretive hunches to follow, then it is best not to interrupt your reading to work through a checklist of questions of the kind given above. Better, in such circumstances, to use such a list after you have made notes or drafted an essay on the strength of your own first insights. At that later stage in your thinking, you may be able to fill out ideas (and build the evidence you present to support them) by comparing the viewpoint you have already developed with other perspectives implicit in the checklist.

The questions listed are only starting points. They should lead into active modes of enquiry, rather than being taken as a complete agenda for reading if you simply answer them. (This applies especially if you pick out individual questions from the list and focus on those exclusively.) One practical way of using the questions is to skim quickly through them after reading the text, deciding without further reference to the text what you might say about each (in many cases this may be nothing at all - see below). As you work through the questions, your attention is likely to be drawn back to details you may not have consciously noticed, some of which may now seem relevant information or evidence and may stimulate directions for further enquiry. Answers to questions you ask yourself - even provisional or negative answers - carry with them

informal kinds of reasoning or explanation that you can now bring into conscious thought. (Generally, asking questions will show that you already have richer intuitions about a text than you thought, simply by being a language user and because you have been exposed to many texts previously.) When you have skimmed through all the questions, go back to whichever ones either fit your prescribed task or prompted your most engaged answers; follow those up, including by reference to later units in this book.

Finally, how do you deal with having no information or answer at all in relation to a given question? First, you should not see this as a serious or permanent setback; seeing a question in need of an answer positively identifies something specific to look into. Often being aware of how an answer might - or would not - contribute to an interpretation can guide insightful reading even without that answer ever being found. For many questions we ask about texts no unique, correct answer could exist; only the answers of others who have asked and investigated such questions before. That is partly why it is empowering to develop ways of reading for which you try to articulate your own analysis and evidence.