This document summarizes key concepts from an academic article by Haas and Flower about reading as a constructive process. The summary includes: 1) Haas and Flower studied how readers of varying experience levels construct meaning as they read aloud. They categorized reader strategies as content-focused, feature/function-focused, or rhetorical-focused. 2) Inexperienced readers (students) focused more on content and features, while experienced readers (graduates) used more rhetorical strategies to understand context and purpose. 3) The study suggests readers can improve by actively applying rhetorical strategies like analyzing audience and purpose, in addition to content strategies. This helps readers mature and better comprehend academic texts.

1. Rhetorical Reading:
Key Concepts from Haas and Flower (pp 559-76)

2. Why people hate poetry.
• Have you ever had a literature class where you were
reading a poem, and then your teacher asked you to
interpret what that poem meant?
• And then, after you interpreted it, your teacher told you
you were WRONG?
• If so, you are not alone….
• However, I’m now going to explain to you why YOUR
TEACHER WAS WRONG. Pay attention….

3. Reading as Constructive Process
• “There is a growing consensus in our field
[the study of rhetoric] that reading should
be thought of as a constructive rather than a
receptive process: that ‘meaning’ does not
exist in a text but in readers and the
representations they build” (Haas and
Flower 561).

4. What does this mean?
• Q: What do they mean when they say that meaning exists
“in the reader” rather than in a written “text?”
• A:
• Well…there’s a kind of critical theory (way of looking
at texts) called “reader-response” criticism. This kind
of criticism says that the “text” isn’t something that
exists on the page.
• Instead, the “text” is the version of the story that is
imagined in a reader’s mind.

5. SO….
• ex. 1: Think of a video that you want to stream: you can choose the high
definition (HD) version of the video, but if you are watching it on your
iPhone 4, you aren’t going to get the same experience that you get if you
watch it through a home theater, right?
• ex. 2: Even better: think of a TV show that you are watching via antenna
at your grandmother’s house. On a black and white TV…with poor
reception because the coat hanger attached to the antenna isn’t really
working, so there’s “snow” all over the screen.
• ex. 3: But most accurately, think of how your friend is telling you a
story about her grandmother’s house (where you’ve never been), and
you are trying to picture what she’s saying…but it’s hard to know all the
details, so you are sort of just imagining it at your grandmother’s house.
• All of these examples help illustrate the concept of reading being a
constructive experience.

6. And SO….
• How do those examples illustrate the concept of reading
being a constructive process?
• Well, the raw data is presented by the source, but the
actual meaning of that data (the text) is something that
is created within the mind of the reader.
• Example 3 in particular is the most appropriate…the
story that the friend is telling is “filtered” through the
mind of the listener (the way a photo changes when a
filter is applied in Instagram)

7. Which means….
• The source (i.e., the source’s author) and the reader may have different ideas of the
meaning of a text.
• So, the real meaning of the text is something created in the mind of the reader, right?
Not the words on the page: they are simply like a blueprint used by a builder to
construct a house…they aren’t the actual house.
• If you accept all of this as true, then that leads you to the realization that each and
every reader must be constructing a different text within his or her head…
• Which means all of these versions will be different, because they will be filtered
through each reader’s own personal experiences and mental framework.
• And each of these versions will be equally valid! They will all be correct
interpretations of the written “text” because the REAL text is the one created in the
mind of each and every reader.
• Which is why your English Literature teacher was WRONG when she said that your
interpretation of the poem was wrong. So there….

8. Haas & Flower’s
Research Space
• Haas and Flower take this idea of writing as a constructive
discourse process and ask two questions about it:
• How does the this constructive process play itself out
in the actual, thinking process of reading?
• Are all readers really aware of or in control of the
discourse act which current theories describe (see
previous slides)?

9. What were their research
methods?
• Readers were all asked to read the exact same text from an
academic source. The excerpt they used did not start at the
beginning of the text, but rather started in the middle, which
required extra work from all readers, no matter their
education level or interests.
• They asked readers of varying levels of proficiency to “think-
aloud” while reading. They recorded this thinking-aloud.
• Their 10 subjects were divided into 2 groups: “student
readers” (6 first-year university students) and “experienced
readers” (graduate students, 3 in engineering and 1 in
rhetoric).

10. Strategies for
Constructing Meaning
• Haas and Flower determined that there are three levels of
strategies readers use when they are reading; these
strategies are ways they “filter” the text in order to
understand the meaning of the text in front of them (and
therefore create meaning in their mind).
• Content Strategies
• Feature Strategies
• Rhetorical Strategies
• Comments made by the readers while reading were coded
to indicate the readers’ use of one of these strategies.

11. Content Strategies
• “Content strategies are concerned with content or topic
information, ‘what the text is about’” (Haas and Flower
569).
• The reader’s goal is gaining information direction from
the text.

12. Function/Feature
Strategies
• Function/feature strategies refer to “conventional, generic
functions of texts, or conventional features of discourse”
(Haas and Flower 569).
• This means that readers were looking at how a part of
the text functioned (“This is the introduction,” “This is
the main point of this paragraph”), rather than the
content itself.
• The reader is looking at what the writer is doing with
the words…what function the words are serving.

13. Rhetorical Strategies
• These strategies of understanding the meaning of a text
“take a step beyond the text itself” (Haas and Flower 570).
These comments indicate that the reader is constructing a
“rhetorical situation for the text, trying to account for the
author’s purpose, context, and effect on the audience.”
• These strategies try to see how the text fits into the
world, basically. Who is the audience? Where was it
published? What was the intended effect of the piece?
• Example: “I wonder if it [the article] is from Ms. [a
particular magazine]”

14. What did they find?
• How did the kinds of comments compare? Haas and
Flower took all (100%, obviously) of the comments made
by the students and all of the comments made by the
experienced readers, and categorized them as follows:
Students Experienced Readers
Content Strategies 77% 67%
Feature Strategies 22% 20%
Rhetorical Strategies 1% 13%

15. What they learned from
this:
• Student readers (freshmen) are far more likely to use
content and function/feature strategies , and to almost
completely disregard rhetorical strategies.
• Experience readers are much more likely to use rhetorical
strategies, although they do still focus most often on
content. Function/feature strategies are used less often then
content strategies and more often than rhetorical strategies.
• So, between freshman year and grad school, readers learn
to start using rhetorical strategies to help them understand
the meaning of texts.

16. So what?
• So what can you take away from this?
• Well, you’ve been learning a LOT about rhetorical
situations this semester, and you’ve been learning to
analyze how these rhetorical situations “play out” in the
texts you are reading.
• If you actively use these rhetorical strategies as you read
academic texts, you will be reading in a more mature
fashion, which should help you as you grow academically.
• Ideally, this will make you better readers of all texts, not
just academic texts.

17. Putting these ideas to work:
• We’ve been talking about rhetoric all semester. In this
unit, we are going to write a rhetorical analysis paper; for
this paper you will analyze the rhetoric used in two
sources.
• Can you see how this assignment will help you build up the
reading “muscles” that you’ll need as you make your way
through more advanced courses?
• Pay attention to the kinds of comments you are making to
yourself as you are reading your two sources for Paper 3.
How do these comments fit into Haas and Flowers reading
strategy categories?

18. work
cited
• Haas, Christina and Linda Flower.
“Rhetorical Strategies and the Construction
of Meaning.” Writing about Writing: A
College Reader, 3rd ed. Ed. Elizabeth
Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017. 561-76. Print.