Take a look around your classroom, your home, or wherever you happen to be. How many examples of informational text can you spot? If you look closely, you'll see that informational text is everywhere--not just newspapers, magazines, and textbooks, but posters, instructions, recipes, advertisements, web pages, and blogs--even the back of a cereal box contains informational text! Since you're surrounded by informational text almost all of the time, learning how to read it quickly and understand it well will make your life much easier.
As you learned earlier in the lesson, your knowledge of text structures can help you read more efficiently--and understand everything you read. To move from a quick, basic read to a thorough understanding of most informational text, though, you need to do more than identify text structures. You need to analyze how the ideas are organized.
Analyzing text structures requires these three basic steps:
| Skim the text to identify typographical cues that show how ideas are organized. |
| Identify the organizational patterns used in the text. |
| Figure out (and explain) why the author organized his or her ideas in this way. |
Why is it important to do all three of these steps? If you understand why an author arranged ideas in a particular way, you will also understand the author's purpose in a way that helps you decide whether or not to accept the information as accurate and complete. In other words, learning to analyze a writer's use of text structures helps you become a more critical reader. It can also make you a better writer as you learn how to organize your own ideas in a way that helps readers follow your points.
