“How can teachers teach their students to perform a kind of reading that they have themselves learned to perform mysteriously and magically?”
I responded with a lot of enthusiasm to Salvatori’s article, and this quote in particular, precisely because I’ve been struggling to articulate my own experience with reading and its influence on my writing. As the proverbial nerd, I grew up immersed in books. I walked around town with a book in constantly in front of my face and spent most afternoons in the library. As I never remember receiving any formal instruction in regards to crafting an essay, I can only assume that those billions of hours spent reading somehow shaped and honed my skills as a writer.
However, I’m not naïve enough to assume that most (or perhaps all) of my students will echo my almost creepy love of literature. While I recognize this and don’t think an intense love of books is essential to good writing, I nonetheless believe my skills as a writer have come from the immense amounts of reading I’ve done throughout my life. My conception of reading, though, has remained one akin to the ‘mysterious and magical’ perspective described by Salvatori. Thus, I’ve been concerned how to teach composition when I can’t truly evaluate and articulate my own interaction with reading and writing. I’ve understood that there must be some sort of connection, but I’ve never really pinpointed how or why that connection surfaced and developed.
Salvatori’s article offered a concrete way to analyze the connection between my writing and reading. The interconnectedness of reading and writing seems natural to me, as does Salvatori’s conception of reading “as a form of thinking” (351). I used Salvatori’s argument on page 354 (where she asserts that a difficult passage in a text is one that demands critical engagement) with a student today in the Writing Lab, and found that the student responded favorably and with greater attention to the complicated poem she was examining. I also liked Salvatori’s assignment described on page 353, which transformed “a rather mechanical study habit—the highlighting of a text—into a strategy”. I plan on devising similar assignments for my students, which I hope will improve their writing and reading skills by highlighting the relationship between the two practices.
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You raise some really good points, Liz- the one aspect of good writing we can't really teach is the lifetime of voracious reading that got us here. I guess besides encouraging them to read lots (or assigning them heavy loads of reading- that's unlikely), the next best thing is to somehow convert what we've learned into a process- Bean discusses this too, suggesting we share our own reading techniques. I planned to do this for poem reading, but hadn't thought to do it for prose reading as well.
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