In Davenport's essay "On Reading," I believe that his thesis sentence is not located in the usual place. I believe I have found it in the middle of the essay. This is what I believe is Davenport's thesis sentence: "All of this points to our having a society that reads badly and communicates execrably about what we read." Davenport's thesis is summing up the idea that desensitized by what we read, and when it comes to interpreting the information that we have just read, we are not analyzing the material critically. When it comes to regurgitate the information that we have so incompletely digested, the ideas that spew forth are garbled from our lack of insight and foresight.
             Davenport supports his thesis by giving examples such as, "In truth, my education was a systematic misleading." He goes further to say, "In a decent society the teacher that lead me to believe this (the misleading information or review of a book) would be tried, found guilty, and ganged by the thumbs while being pelted with old eggs and cabbage stalks." I have found from my own experiences that the first quote I mentioned in this paragraph is not far from the truth. Throughout my high school days, I was forced to look at a book from a forced view. The view that I was forced to see was the one that the teacher was taught by her teachers. They did not take the liberty of interpreting the material in their own way. My senior English teacher Dr. Lumpkin was an excellent teacher. He challenged the formal ideas of what everyone was being taught in the adjacent rooms. We were mesmerized by his shear audacity to work against the system for our benefit. He is the one who allowed me to open up my mind and never rule out anything just because a teacher said it was wrong or could not be done. He said, "Keep your mind open and free but when it comes to the test you must think like your teacher."
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