Reading-to-write issues


What I found perhaps most interesting about the Bean chapter is how I myself have never considered the ways in which I learned the reading skills he outlines. And I'm not even sure if I could say that I perform all of the reading habits well (cultural context, tracking complex syntax?). It also took me a long time to be "good reader." Even through the first few years of graduate school, I couldn't understand how to read just for the gist or main point because I was paranoid about missing other elements. No one taught me that that was actually a productive way to read, and instead I felt like I was maybe not going to get away with something.

As I read Bean, I kept wondering if this is a document that would benefit student learning to show them (or an abridged version). Showing students what exactly is allowed and expected--even possible as an end goal--would offer a sort of transparency about a process that seems rather opaque (so opaque in fact that when Bean originally outlines the 10 problems with reading, I was unsure that there could really be 10!). The primary reading-to-write problems students seem to fall into, in my experience, is the "inadequate vocabulary" and "cultural literacy." I've seen many papers in the Writing Center as well as in my own classes that misuse terms and ideas because they picked them up from a source and the student knows it's important or meaningful but can't figure out how to use the phrase or idea or word correctly. This is particularly difficult to explain to students because I of course don't want to patronize them by demeaning their vocabulary, but the words they use generally stick out like a sore thumb when all the other words are monosyllabic and dependent on simple sentence structures. When students read, even poorly, they can imply the context, but when they write, words they read get tossed in and around quite awkwardly.

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