Session 4 Reading Guide:
10 Questions will be fine, please see below requirements.
Please submit your own reading guide. It could reflect the conversation you just had in your group but you should also add any other important elements you think crucial to understanding the book.
As a discussion group, you have examined some specific topics and themes from your selected text. Now, imagine you are going to be leading a discussion on the book you just read. This places you as the “expert” on the book, determining what the themes of the book are and what you want a group of readers finally to understand about the book. Be sure to read and study carefully the requirements in the rubric for this assignment and make sure your reading guide includes them. I have not added all the requirements below.
The purpose of the reading guide is two-fold: 1) to demonstrate a good understanding of the book for the grading purposes of this course (a list of only 10 questions would not demonstrate that) and 2) to serve as a tool of discussion for any group of readers gathered to study the book together.
Although it is impossible to cover all the themes of your book in only 10 to 15 questions, the rubric asks for you to include only 10 to 15 questions. I am allowing you to ask 10-15 question sets. Unless you set each question or group of very related questions within the context of a chapter, the reading guide would be useless to a reading group and would not allow you to demonstrate to me an understanding of the entire book and Lewis’s ideas.
Formatting Your Reading Guide:
Your reading guide submission must include a cover page with a unique title that reflects the main purpose of rationale of the guide. In other words, your title should identify the guide’s organizing principle or the main point of your approach to the work.
On page 2, open your reading guide with an introductory paragraph of about five sentences that give a short overview of the book and the purpose or rationale behind your reading guide. Begin the list of question sets immediately after the introductory paragraph.
Your reading guide must contain at least 10 and no more than 15 sets of questions. Each number in the list could have more than one question. Number your list of 10 to 15 sets. These sets could capture the following:
Main ideas from the text (Use at least two quotes from the text in your entire guide.)
If your book is fiction, questions about characters
Themes found in the text
How the text affects or impacts the reader
The 10-15 question sets are the most important part of the guide, but questions that are not placed in the context of the book would not be very useful to the users of your reading guide. After each question/s, provide the chapter and page numbers that would point the users of your guide to the answers. You could do this in a brief sentence following each question. You do not need to discuss the answers to the questions at all. (Some reading guides also provide a leader’s guide, which would offer a possible answer to each question, but your reading guide is one for a member of a reading group.) Do not answer your own questions.
Your reading guide should demonstrate an in-depth understanding of the text, the characters, the themes, and occasionally a personal application of the ideas in the text. Only a few of the questions should have a personal application.
Again, each itemized set could have more than one question or only one question. Be sure to precede the question/s with a discussion that places the questions in a context. Then, after the question/s, make sure to cite where the answers can be found. On a separate page after your entire list, put a References page.
Overall, your reading guide should be useful to its users. Hopefully, some of you will actually gather a group of friends or church members and use the reading guide you create.
Recapping the requirements:
Remember that you must make your questions specific to the book you have read and discussed. Be sure that each of the 10-15 question sets is placed in the context of the book. This would mean that you introduce the questions with a short discussion as well as provide page numbers in the discussion, the questions, and/or after the questions to help the user of your guide find the answer to your questions.
Study with great care and attention the rubric that I will use to grade your individual reading guide. The specific instructions for the reading guide are in the rubric. Please place each category of questions that you put in your guide within the larger context of the entire book or individual, relevant chapter. You can set that context by beginning each category of questions with a short discussion that provides insight into Lewis’s ideas. You must also provide the page number or numbers where a person using your guide could find the answer to each one of your individual questions, but do not answer the questions yourself.
Format your guide according to the 7th edition APA rules, opening with a cover sheet, following with the guide (introduction and list of question sets), and ending with a separate References page. Number each page and double space everything except the line between the unique title and your name on the cover page.
Please use the following as references
A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis
Mere Chnristianity – C.S. Lewis
