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The Case for Critical Literacy explores the history of reading within writing studies and lays the foundation for understanding the impact of this critical, yet often untaught, skill. Every measure of students’ reading comprehension, whether digital or analog, demonstrates that between 50 and 80 percent of students are unable to capture the substance of a full discussion or evaluate material for authority, accuracy, currency, relevancy, appropriateness, and bias.
 
This book examines how college-level instruction reached this point and provides pedagogical strategies that writing instructors and teachers can use to address the problem. Alice Horning makes the case for the importance of critical reading in the teaching of writing with intentionality and imagination, while sharing glimpses of her own personal history with reading and writing. Horning provides the context for understanding what college faculty face in their classrooms and offers a history of critical literacy that explains why, to date, it has mostly neglected or ignored the diverse statuses of students’ reading challenges.
 
The Case for Critical Literacy explores actionable options to better meet students’ literacy needs. College and university faculty, especially writing instructors, will benefit from an understanding of what has happened in the field and what needs to change.
 

The Radical Case for Teaching Skim Reading in First-Year Writing encourages faculty, particularly in writing studies, to check internal biases toward deep reading and teach skim reading in first-year writing courses. Written by Ellen C. Carillo, who has previously published on the importance of teaching deep reading, this small book is a controversial prompt for further discussion and exploration.
 
Data from studies of the lived experiences of undergraduates indicate that students do not need deep reading practices in the majority of their classes across the disciplines and, moreover, that students succeed in their classes by skim reading. Rather than imagining an idealized set of circumstances that allow for sustained deep reading, as does a great deal of the scholarship on reading in writing studies, The Radical Case for Teaching Skim Reading in First-Year Writing argues for teaching students reading practices that will support their success in their college writing assignments rather than those strategies the field believes should support their success.
 
In our information landscape and our fragile democracy, encouraging skimming as opposed to deep reading may seem like a gamble—this very tendency toward the quick rather than the critical has undoubtedly contributed to the current crisis of mass misinformation. However, teaching students to use skim reading as a strategic tool for purposeful engagement and efficient yet thoughtful information filtering better equips them to navigate the rapidly changing information landscape and manage the fast-paced flow of content from diverse media sources.