Noteworthy: Reading Strategies in Practice

Rebecca Campbell’s Noteworthy uses readings, annotations, examples, and guided activities to develop college reading. Five chapters move from strategic reading to informational, narrative, and scholarly texts, then connect reading with writing. The complete 2025 text is used here. Its reader-style design means the included passages are both teaching material and opportunities to practice the strategy being explained.

Chapter-by-chapter summaries

Chapter 1: Introduction to Strategic Reading

Reading changes with purpose, material, and the task that follows. The chapter introduces college reading types, critical reading, online resources, vocabulary development, and annotation. Annotation is selective attention made visible: notes should record a question, relationship, or interpretation rather than mark every sentence. The self-reflection activities help readers identify their habits and choose a strategy intentionally instead of assuming one pace and method suits every text.

Chapter 2: Reading Informational Texts

Informational texts present ideas through choices of purpose, audience, and evidence. The chapter develops rhetorical reading and connections among sources, then uses a reading about feedback to make interpretation practical. Understanding a comment requires identifying the problem it describes before deciding how to revise. The student examples connect comprehension with action, showing that receiving information does not guarantee a productive response to it.

Chapter 3: Reading Narrative Texts

The narrative chapter examines storytelling and the construction of a meaningful account of identity. Events become a story through selection, perspective, and organization. Readers need to notice how the telling shapes significance rather than treat a narrative as an unmediated record of experience. The professional-world connection broadens the relevance of storytelling while preserving attention to audience and the purpose of the account.

Chapter 4: Reading Academic Texts

Academic articles have recognizable parts that perform different functions, but effective reading is more than proceeding through them mechanically. The chapter introduces article structure and strategies for engaging scholarly sources as contributions to a conversation. A reader asks what question is addressed, what evidence supports the answer, and how the work relates to other positions. This approach makes unfamiliar detail easier to organize around a central purpose.

Chapter 5: The Reading–Writing Connection

The final chapter distinguishes an immediate reaction from a developed response. Critical readers resist an oversimplified agree-or-disagree choice, consider relationships among ideas, and use writing to construct meaning. Sample responses and a case study make that process visible. The writing-assignment reading adds another interpretive task: understanding what an assignment requests before choosing evidence and form. Reading and drafting therefore become mutually informative stages of inquiry.

Glossary and References

The glossary supports precise use of concepts introduced across the chapters, while references and attributions make the readings traceable. These resources are useful when a familiar word has a more specific role in the course. Returning to the original example can clarify a term more effectively than memorizing its definition without context.

Study instructions

1. Choose a purpose before reading and explain why the selected strategy fits it.
2. Annotate a short passage with questions and relationships, then write a summary without looking at the notes.
3. Compare your first reaction with a later evidence-based response and identify what changed.
4. Use the chapter activities and sample student work to revise one reading or writing habit at a time.

Sources and coverage

This original study guide follows the linked source edition and its chapters or explicitly identified sections. It condenses the main ideas and their relationships; examples and practice directions are for study alongside the complete text. Complete source edition.