Critical reading is hard to do right but when you do it becomes immensely helpful in all the schoolwork you do. As a critical reader you have to do a lot to prepare yourself before you even begin to read. Reading up about the author can help us learn a lot about the piece we're about to read before we even open it. If we learn about the author's different biases, political/religious affiliations, traumatic live events, etc. we can begin to interpret what his writing is going to be about.
Brundage also stresses the importance of comparing different texts. Comparing different books to one another allows us to piece together the information the authors share and the information that both authors leave out or is different. Like Brundage points out, one of the easiest comparisons to do is by the titles of two different books. The titles themselves can tell so much about an author's perspective and we don't even need to do any reading.
Questions: Does every piece of historical writing contain even the slightest amount of bias? Why or why not?
What steps can you take as a historian to be as least biased as possible when writing?
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