Habit of Mind 2
Using documents and other primary data: developing the skills necessary to analyze point of view and context, and to understand and interpret information
Reflection
The
most important word when coming to this habit of mind is analyze, to
examine carefully and identifying key factors and causes, When first
encountering the DBQ Essay prompt, I didn’t expect it to come with a set
of documents let alone using images to analyze the point of view and
tone of the information given. Using documents and other sources of
knowledge to support your essay, the first step is to analyze and
interpret the information given in the documents. Being a new incoming
sophomore, I had no idea how to analyze, or even the definition to it,
let alone how to interpret what I was reading from the documents. But
Mr. Rodriguez taught us what to look for when reading the documents,
break down, and organize the them using SOAPSTone(S-speaker, O-occasion,
A-audience, P-purpose, S-subject, and Tone) and APPARTS(A-author,
P-prior knowledge, P-place and time, A-audience, R-reason, T-the main
idea, and S-significance) charts. By using these very helpful charts, it
helped me understand what to look for and analyze while reading
documents. This habit of mind is very useful when writing DBQ essays,
because it will assist us in breaking down the information given to us. I
improved on this habit thanks to all the readings and going over our
interpretations of the documents in class. Without the instructional
help, I still think I might have struggled with this habit of mind. This
by far is the most helpful since it helped me gather up information
from the documents without really knowing the topic and it was very
useful when taking the A.P. test.
Evidence
For
habit of mind two, I chose a SOAPSTone chart that I completed for page
804 in the textbook. SOAPSTone charts help the understanding of what a
document is saying. It also helped me analyze the author, point of view,
and helped prepare me for analyzing documents for DBQ essays.
