Critical Reading Samples

Reading 1:

“We have customers who say, ‘Well, I don’t want it (a new $2,000 TV) if it can’t be hooked up by Sunday …’ ” — Best Buy sales guy

There are three great mysteries in America today: 1) how we got into such a big credit hole; 2) when about 96.3% of us began eating too much, spawning an obesity problem; c) how the Super Bowl got so gosh-darned big, too.

Yes, the big day is here.

Again.

If there’s a thread that binds today, it is that at VI o’clock, about III/IVs of us will be tuning in to ogle all the elements of Super Bowl XLIII and the rest of mankind will blissfully adjust.

Remember back in school when we learned Roman numerals?

Who would have ever known we’d only need to know them to count specific football games?

And why with Roman numerals?

For continuity, wouldn’t it be fun to also keep the score in Xs, Vs, and Ls?

When Janet Jackson’s top fell down a few Supers ago, instead of creating a national tempest, shouldn’t it have simply been hailed as Super Bowl XXX?

Can you imagine the confusion in only a few more years when it will be the 49th Super Bowl and referred to either as Super Bowl XXXXIX or Super Bowl XXXXVIIII or Super Bowl XLIX?

Yes, here we are, celebrating again.

The Super Bowl itself is like the Academy Awards, of course.

It is always a little too long, a little too overdone and the entertainment segments – in football’s case, the halftime show — always seems to be lacking.

In the Super Bowl’s case, if you ask me, they should also quit playing the game in some namby-pamby warm-weather site.

This is football, not water ballet or “American Idol.”

These are rough, tough, behemoth men, crashing into each other, like a NASCAR wreck every 50 seconds.

It’s also a sport played in the middle of winter.

I want to see clouds of steam coming off the players’ backs and heads.

I want to see icicles dangling from the coach’s headset.

It’s also just not as much fun watching some 20something male with no shirt, his chest painted in Steeler yellow and black, in the 75-degree comfort of Tampa or Tempe.

Yet Super Sunday itself?

I think it is wonderful.

-"How did a single football game ever become so XL?" by Bill Flick

















Reading 2:

Defenders of holistic scoring might reply (as one anonymous reviewer did), that holistic scores are not perfect or absolutely objective readings but just “judgments that most readers will agree are the appropriate ones given the purpose of the assessment and the system of communication.” But I have been in and even conducted enough holistic scoring sessions to know that even that degree of agreement doesn’t occur unless “purpose” and “appropriateness” are defined to mean acceptance of the single set of standards imposed on that session. We know too much about the differences among readers and the highly variable nature of the reading process. Supposing we get readings only from academics, or only from people in English, or only from respected critics, or only from respected writing programs, or only from feminists, or only from sound readers of my tribe (white, male, middle-class, full professors between the ages of fifty and sixty). We still don’t get agreement. We can sometimes get agreement among readers from some subset, a particular community that has developed a strong set of common values, perhaps one English department or one writing program. But what is the value of such a rare agreement? It tells us nothing about how readers from other English departments or writing programs will judge—much less how readers from other domains will judge.

(From the opposite ideological direction, some skeptics might object to my skeptical train of thought: “So what is new?” they might reply. “Of course my grades are biased, ‘interested’ or ‘situated’—always partial to my interests or the values of my community or culture. There’s no other possibility.” But how can people consent to give grades if they feel that way? A single teacher’s grade for a student is liable to have substantial consequences—for example on eligibility for a scholarship or a job or entrance into professional school. In grading, surely we must not take anything less than genuine fairness as our goal.)

-“Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking” by Peter Elbow