trong readers, we’ve said, remake what they have read to serve their own ends, putting things together, figuring out how ideas and examples relate, explaining as vest they can material that is difficult or problematic, translating phrases like Richard Rodriguez’s ‘scholarship boy’ into their own terms…by writing down your thoughts, placing one idea against another, complementing on what you’ve done, taking examples into account, looking back at where you began, perhaps changing you mind, and mobbing on.” (p.12)Operating on the traits in the above passage, we can analyze Jane Tompkins on her ability to manage within these standards. Clearly we have seen that by contradicting herself on purpose only to address the reasons behind this strategy in her conclusion, Tompkins has taken “examples into account” and by looking back where she began, she changed her mind. These techniques are all executed through concise and tactical writing skills all linked to those of a “strong reader”.“ It is hard to distinguish the act of reading from the act of writing. In fact the connection between reading and writing can be seen as almost a literal one.”(p.12)In the terms described by Bartholomae and Petrosky, Tompkins analysis can ultimately be a work of critical reading, since in their description the differences between reading and writing are often minimal as this is illustrated in the passage above.Bartholomae and Petrosky’s introduction to strong reading and writing was able to set up the observation skills necessary to critically read Jane Tompkins’s essay and receive something more than a story about some Indians. In fact these skills were so prevalent in the reading, they essentially comprised the entire essay Indians. These kinds of similarities are extremely useful for readers of the text. Within Bartholomae and Petrosky’s introduction, the skills wer...
