Before you start reading, it's important to figure out what you're reading. Are you looking at an article or a news story? A website or social media post? Who wrote it? Who is sharing it? If you’re reading a piece on economics by a Nobel prize-winning economist, you should know that before you read it. Conversely, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits of milk consumption that was put out by the dairy industry, you want to know that as well.
Investigating the source doesn't require in-depth research. It can be a quick check of the expertise and agenda of what you're looking at online. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.
When you find yourself needing to evaluate a website or social media post you'll probably start by scrolling up and down, reading everything you can on the page, judging the content and how the information is presented on the webpage. However, professional fact checkers employ the opposite strategy. They leave the website and open multiple tabs to look up information about the source's credibility and what others are saying about the reliability of the content being shared.
Check out the following video to learn more about Lateral Reading.
Video is from Citizen Literacy online toolkit, created by Robert Detmering, Amber Willenborg, and Terri Holtze for University of Louisville Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
One way to practice lateral reading is to "Just Add Wikipedia." When you come across a source or claim you are unfamiliar with, the quickest way to find additional information is to search Wikipedia.
You may have been taught that Wikipedia is an untrustworthy source, because anyone can edit anything. However, Wikipedia has implemented policies and practices that have improved its reliability. You should still think twice about using it as a reference in a school assignment, but it is a great tool to use in your SIFT process to help validate sources, check unfamiliar websites, quickly investigate a claim, check unfamiliar academic sources, and find additional citations and references to help with your research.
Check out the following video for more information and to see this strategy in action.
The information on this research guide is adapted from Mike Caulfield's materials with a CC BY 4.0 license, CTRL-F Verification Skills Module, presented by CIVIX, and Caulfield, M., & Wineburg, S. S. (2023). Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online. The University of Chicago Press.