Read Better to Write Better -

It has been over two years since I started working in the Writing Center Lab at the Milwaukee Area Technical College. Throughout a single semester I usually assist over 300 students to either proofread or “jump start” their college papers. As I observed, many students become frustrated with the amount of reading they have to do and they easily lose focus on the message the author is trying to convey. Another common problem students demonstrate is that after reading an assigned text, they are not always able to concisely analyze or properly interact with the text. As a result, the amount of writing and reading required at the college level is one of the biggest contributing factors for student dropout rates. John Bean in Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom and Mike Bunn in “How to Read Like a Writer”, list several reasons why such difficulties arise and provide suggestions on how to become a better writer and reader. Although both authors emphasize how to become a better reader, Bean focuses on understanding of textual meaning, while the Bunn focuses in analyzing the structure a writer uses to convey a message.

According to Bean, students have learned to read in the sense of achieving basic literacy and demonstrates several difficulties when reading. He supports his claims with words of a sociology professor collaborating with a reading theorist (Roberts and Roberts, 2008), that students need to become "deep readers," who focus on meaning, as opposed to "surface readers," who focus on facts and information. Throughout the article, Bean identifies eleven contributing causes of students' reading difficulties: A school culture that rewards surface reading, students' resistance to the time-on-task required for deep reading, teachers' willingness to lecture over reading material, failure to adjust reading strategies for different purposes, difficulty in adjusting reading strategies to different genres, difficulty in perceiving the structure of an argument as they read, difficulty in reconstructing the text’s original rhetorical context, difficulty seeing themselves in conversation with the author, difficulty in assimilating the unfamiliar, lack of the cultural literacy assumed by the author, and difficulties with vocabulary and syntax.

Moreover, Bean points out a few practices that don’t promote efficiency in reading ability. For instance, using quizzes to motivate reading, as “quizzes tend to promote surface rather than deep reading”; wrongly lecturing over readings hoping to close the gap of reading deficiency; and not allowing students to be responsible for texts not covered in class. Some of Bean’s main approach to help students read includes: “empower students by helping them see why the texts are difficult, explain to students how our own reading process varies, help students get the dictionary habit, teach students "what it says" and "what it does", show students note-taking and responding process, awaken students' curiosity about upcoming readings , show students the importance of knowing cultural codes, help students see that all texts are trying to change their view and reflect the author’s frame of reference, create "Reading Guides", and Teach Students to Play the "Believing and Doubting Game."

On the other hand, by reading like a writer, Bunn suggests writers identify some of the choices the author make to better understand how such choices might arise when writing. For instance, to carefully examine the reading and look at writerly techniques in the text in order to adopt similar (or the same) techniques when writing, attempt to understand how the piece was put together by the author and what can be learned about writing by reading a particular text, and to consider what techniques could have made the text better.

Finally, both authors emphasizes how to become a better reader and consequently a better writer. Bean focuses on understanding of textual meaning, while Bunn focuses on analyzing the structure a writer uses to convey a message. Bean points out that students have learned to read in the sense of achieving basic literacy, demonstrates several difficulties when reading, and argue a few practices that don’t promote efficiency in reading ability; while Bunn suggests writers read deeply to identify some of the choices the author made to better understand how such choices might arise when writing. I’ve always thought that quizzes are not a good measurement of knowledge and comprehension, but it is new to me that teaching about the readings is not as effective as making a student being responsible for a material not covered in class. Since there is complexity in both writing and reading, and there is no textual comprehension without a complete understanding of definitions, I will explain to students how the reading process varies from author to author, and get them to use the dictionary in line with contextual clues often. I also plan to incorporate most of the approaches from both authors as a reader, a writer, and a teacher and maybe with that, I can start to inspire better readers and successful writers.