reading responce #3

Kyle Barclay
English 100

Reading Response #3



Birkerts’s essay had a number of different key points that belonged to it. After reading his essay, it seems to me that his mission is to notify others in how they read and to understand the full meaning of what they had just read. He has many examples of how this has come to be and what it could be in the near future. For example: he states that we are experiencing times of loss of depth in how we understand our reading. In this essay, he tries to make sense of this and to convince readers that most people now do not understand what they are reading with the idea that others don’t get all that they could be getting out of a text.
“Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life.” This was Birkerts’s definition of what he thought wisdom means. What he is saying here is that wisdom isn’t just about knowing facts of what is going on, and that you must understand the full meaning of what is happening or what is said. This is one of the many key points to this essay because to have wisdom, is to understand the full “Truth, meaning, soul, destiny…” of what is happening. In reading, many people do not do this and will just pass their eyes across what is being said. Others prefer on deflating texts and the whole picture. Birkerts challenges this and explains what it truly means to understand a reading. To fully understand a reading, people will re-read paragraphs, and will relate to what is happening. This wisdom goes along with what Birkerts is saying because a reader must have wisdom as a key part of understanding texts.
In the essay, “On Reading a Video Text,” Robert Scholes has the similar approach as Birkerts does. In this essay, Scholes explains how we understand readings more than what they actually are. The Budweiser example he gives shows that by making good calls as an empire, you will be rewarded with a Budweiser beer. This is not true in reality because by doing something good, a person will not be rewarded in that manner. Just because the Empire made a good call, doesn’t mean he is rewarded every time. Overall, these two authors talk about not forgetting the past and to make people understand that we need to fully understand what others are trying to say in their messages.