How To Read Document Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

How To Read Document - Essay Example re of course only interested in their present, with presenting their opinions and viewpoints about contemporary events that they wish to either control, alter, or preserve. The people that took the time as well as the effort to write these documents wanted to have their views understood by their contemporaries, and these have in some cases survived to the present day. When reading a document it is best to examine the background of the author or authors that wrote it. The content, style, and meanings of documents can be heavily influenced by social, economic, political, military, and sometimes religious events that were happening at the time the documents were written. For instance documents written during stable and peaceful periods should be more moderate and well considered than other documents produced during periods of high drama or conflict. The reader will read documents with a higher degree of understanding by taking into account the beliefs, the attitudes, and the position of the author or authors of those documents. Attempting to fully grasp the beliefs and the motives of the writers will help the reader to place individual documents in the most apt context. Knowing why people decided to write something can allow us to understand how they wrote their documents in the ways that they are actually written. Such an understanding allows us to understand the bias or the subjectivity within each document. Bias is something that is very difficult to keep out of documents that were written in relation to social, economic, political, military, and religious issues or events. Having an awareness of bias can help to explain why some documents seem to be full of extreme or radical viewpoints not to mention concepts, which might be considered to be out of date in our contemporary period. It would be very difficult to consciously produce a document that does reflect the time and the place it was actually written in. Documents intended to record events as they