I want to share some thoughts on deciphering bias and its implications while reading critically. This is important & personal to me, as a teacher.

Bias is unfarily presenting an opinion in order to persuade. Bias is based on your background and life experiences.

Bias is not inherently negative although the word often has negative connotations. We all are entitled to opinions and can voice them but when an opinion is only presented as one-sided, we have to dig a little deeper to determine why that might be.

First, the author’s bias needs to be taken into account while reading. Who is the person writing? What is their background? What do we know about them? We also can often decipher author’s bias through word choice and diction.

What is written but also what has been left out? The unwritten story is often times the most critical piece to determining the one-sided opinion and author’s bias, especially if important critical prices of information have been left out.

Additionally, readers should also consider the intended audience in relationship to bias. Who is the author speaking to directly? Obviously anything in print can be read by the general public but often times pieces are not written that way.

What is the publication or medium that a piece is published in? Something written in Teen Vogue would have a very different intended audience than a piece in Financial Times. Critical readers take intended audience into account along with the author’s bias while reading.

It’s also important to consider your own bias when entering into reading critically. What perhaps unfair, limited, or one-sided opinions do I have on this topic? How will this affect how I process the content presented? Our own bias plays an important role too while reading.

Last point I want to make is the transactional reading relationship. When learning about L2 reading theory, there was a debate regarding if reading is bottom-up (the text itself) or top-down (the reader’s brain) and the conclusions are that it’s both.

Readers cannot solely rely on the words written on the page to create meaning. The top-down thought processes are just as necessary. I would like to stress that these skills need to continually developed just like a muscle. Reading is thinking!

I don’t know if this is helpful. I swear I’m a decent teacher! I began writing this when our fandom began to ask if it’s ok to read an article (“can i click on this?”) out of fear of giving ad money and then the move to screen shotting a paragraph/sentence to cancel articles.

We as a fandom can not rely on a select few accounts to decide if something can or cannot be read. We individually need to develop the critical thinking skills ourselves. These are not ARMY fandom skills but lifelong thinking skills. Our brain is a muscle! Work it out!