Week 5– Liam Justiniano

Mike Caufield is great at creating visuals to help readers better understand the concepts he covers. In the past I’ve read “lateral reading” and I’ve been able to understand what it is and why it is important, but I’ve never fully understood why reading vertically was bad. That was never fully described to me so then it also wasn’t fully discouraged. For a long time, probably even very recently, I read laterally still. I would open up additional pages just for the sake of practicing good efforts, but I really fully understood or maybe fully cared about why vertical reading wasn’t effective. 

That was until Caufield made the connection to a spiderweb. We think of the internet as a web. It’s been described as such in any aspect that I’ve personally run into. However, using the analogy of a spiider’s web when conducting research is really a great way of understanding lateral reading. Reading laterally you not only get the chance to go around and fact check the source, you’re also setting up future validity and you’re able to tease and “feel out” sort of the string that is all connected. 

You’re able to jump around the web tracing the sources back and finding new information by just scurrying around. I think the most important thing I’m learning and just how useful lateral reading is just not in fact checking though but just gathering information. If you’re able to check out the fact that this author is reliable you may also find other published works that provide more information or different information. You may find more articles adn authors when researching the database or the magazzine or news source. Reading laterally is not only just a great tool to safely navigate the internet and reliably navigate around, but it’s also a great practice when collecting information. 

Reading laterally has to draw and collect information from a variety of different sources as well which can also expose you to different understandings and opinions about a certain topic. I think that it could be beneficial to see what different people are saying about certain topics, but also what they are saying about certain topics. Different opinions are being heard in magazines than maybe peer reviewed journals or even general news sites. It is also interesting to see what different facts are shared on different websites as well. There are certain statistics about, for example, diesel trucks that may be more beneficial for an informational article about diesel trucks than a car dealership or a magazine about cars. It really can be interesting to see what statistics are shared where and lateral reading helps you see the context of your topic much larger.