On the first day of class, I orient students to the different parts and sections of the New York Times, showing which parts we will initially be focusing on collectively, together:
- Page A1 — the front page, which I tell students is like a “table of contents” for what is going on in the world. It’s not the only thing that’s going on in the world, of course, but the New York Times editors have chosen and arranged these particular articles and stories that provide analysis, understanding, and credible reporting.
- Op-Ed pages, which is where we will spend most of our time, as this is where the issues of the day, the ideas of the day — social, cultural, economic, political, scientific — are posed and argued by public intellectuals employing a wide range of ideological and rhetorical strategies. I suggest that by reading the Op-Ed pages, we are being invited into public and civic conversations on issues that should matter to us, and should matter deeply.
- Style section, Business, Science, Arts, etc.: I walk them through how the newspaper is put together and how they can — and should — pursue their own interests and curiosities.
I then pull up a recent Op-Ed essay and model a close, critical reading. I want them to notice sentences like this, “We all slip into the general patterns of psychology and sociology sometimes, but we aren’t captured by them. People live and get pregnant one by one, and each life and each pregnancy has its own unlikely story.” There are claims in those sentences. Can we identify them? Does the writer support his claims? And that he invokes a couple of academic disciplines helps on this introductory day, too.
Or I might pull up recent articles on Ferguson and on #Ferguson, as it is a timely issue about which students may have already developed an opinion, or have questions, or might want to learn more about:
I then discuss why we are reading the New York Times, emphasizing the intellectual and critical-thinking work that the New York Times fosters and that we will be pursuing together:
Why read, study, and analyze the New York Times?
Your instructor has a few assumptions and claims about this:
- Educated, intellectually engaged, curious, culturally and civically aware citizens read—or should read—the New York Times every single day, seven days a week
- The New York Times, for various historical and cultural reasons, has become known, rightly or wrongly, as the “paper of record” in the U.S.. It seems, therefore, that we — no matter our political preferences and ideologies — have an intellectual obligation to read the New York Times every day
- We read, study, discuss, and reflect on the New York Times as an object of study, not as a vessel of truth
- After this course is over and you take more writing- and research-intensive courses, you will be able to establish credibility as a writer by integrating the New York Times and exploiting its primary- and secondary-source research capabilities
- One of the most pressing questions in contemporary academic- and professional-writing contexts, and in
higher education is about the role of technology in our work. Some people argue that our increasing dependence on communication technologies is decreasing our collective sense of effective communication; others argue that our literacy practices are merely changing and evolving and that they have always changed and evolved — that “effective communication” is deeply contextual and rhetorical. The New York Times is an interesting primary source in this context. We will compare the writing, editing, and technologies in both the print and digital versions. - It’s interesting to compare the experiences of reading a daily, national periodical such as the New York Times with, say, a textbook
- The President of the United States starts his day with the New York Times, so you should, too.