Reading and Writing

Daniel Libertz

Let's think through some connections between reading and writing.

Connection 1. There is a powerful advantage to reading as you write: being an attentive reader-who-writes (or writer-who-reads). As you write, you write something, you read it back. Does this say what I want it to say? Is that the word I want? Is this in the right order? And then you might change what you wrote and ask the same questions again. Or, you might wait. Maybe you don't do this until you have a full draft, or something close to it. This, of course, is the process of revision—to see again what you already have written down and then decide what changes you want to make based on that second (or third, or fourth, or eleventh) "vision."

Connection 2. There is also the oft-repeated advice that, to be a good writer, you have to read a lot and read deeply. It certainly can't hurt to do that! The more sentences you take in, the more ways of using language you'll experience to make things (knowledge, feelings, whatever you want to call it).

Connection 3. While you read, you are trying to "make sense" of the reading, beyond only the exact definitions of words. What are you doing? You are asking questions, you are checking in to see how any one part you are reading fits in with the larger argument or narrative, you are connecting what you are reading to your own personal experience, and so on. Thus, there are advantages to writing while you read, so you capture the "sense" you are making for future meaning-making.

For this chapter, though, I want to focus on the last connection (Connection 3), and outline some specific strategies for writing while reading. Of course, no one uses these strategies all the time. That depends on how much time and energy you have, your purpose in reading, the kind of reading you are doing, and so on. But the purpose of this chapter is to offer a menu of approaches to reading that can help you as a writer and reader. Try some out! You might find use for a few of them, or for all of them, but at different times.

Ellen C. Carillo argues that it is useful to think in terms of "mindful reading,"or being aware of the processes you are using as a reader and learning when you might "need to relinquish a particular reading approach and introduce an alternative one" while also reflecting on why you might need an alternative approach (123). What works for you, well, works—but it might not always work. Thus, it is important to be open to learning and trying new things in your reading.

For more on connections between reading and writing, please see our chapter on revision, analysis, finding and evaluating sources, and writing with other voices. Our argument throughout this text, really, is that when you consider your reading as connected to your writing, it opens up a lot of possibilities for getting the most out of both.

Getting Started: Strategies before Reading

There are a number of strategies you can try out before you get started reading, and many of them revolve around reviewing your text before you start reading (or listening, or viewing). Reviewing activates what you already know about the topic and can make your reading a bit smoother. Also, having a rough idea of how the text is organized gives you a head start; in other words, investing that time up front can save you time later. Here are some strategies you can try:

Write down what your purpose for reading is. Are you looking for information to support an argument? Are you trying to understand an opposing view? Do you want to familiarize yourself with a topic you know little about? Knowing why you are reading will help you focus more deeply on relevant portions and speed up a little more on parts that are less relevant to you.

Consider the genre of the text you are reading, i.e., the type of document and how that document has common "moves" or features that help signal to audiences different kinds of reading. Writing studies scholar Michael Bunn recommends that students and teachers discuss what type of reading is assigned and how there might be specific ways to read that text (512). For instance, a "white paper" report is usually a kind of document that is written for decision-makers who need information. White papers often conclude with one or more recommended actions. An academic article, by contrast, is an exploration of research conducted by an expert, which often does not conclude with clear answers but with several questions for other researchers to take up. These purposes result in different structures, and knowing about those structures ahead of time helps readers take in the information more easily.

Read closely the parts of the text that tend to summarize the main argument. If there is an abstract, read every word. An abstract is a brief summary of an academic article or report. Read all section headings. Read the first and last paragraphs. Reading around the text like this can help give you a good sense of what the text is about before you do a closer and more engaged reading.

Try to write a sentence that describes what you think the reading is about. Be tentative and open to being wrong (which is okay to be).

Getting to It: Strategies while Reading

Generally speaking, using a combination of slower reading where you pay careful attention to the range of meanings (eg, "close reading") and quicker reading (e.g., skimming) can be helpful depending on the difficulty and type of text you are reading. Think about how to keep your mind and body active, especially while you are slowing down to contemplate more deeply what you do and do not fully understand. Keeping your body engaged while reading can take many forms. Creating marks and writing in response to your reading is one way to help sustain such engagement.

Remember your purpose as you are reading (see previous section).

Take spontaneous notes. You can simply write quick notes with some scattered thoughts or try the more sustained writing that some of the following items in this list of strategies call for.

Annotate. This means writing right on your book, paper, or screen. If you are reading a print copy, you can use pen or pencil to make notes in the margins. If it is a digital copy, you can use a PDF reader's highlight and/or commenting function to make notes. You can also use programs like Hypothes.is, Perusall, or other applications/software programs that have more sophisticated ways to annotate—and, what's great about these is that you can annotate with friends, and get ideas from their ideas! See the end of this chapter for tips on annotating. Here is a picture of what it might look like on a print text (note how you can do this with or without highlighting—both work!):

Highlight or underline. Make sure that if you do this, you don't highlight or underline too much. If more than, say, one-third of the page is highlighted or underlined, it defeats the purpose, because nothing will stand out if most of the page is yellow (or pink, or blue). If you have the time and patience, it is even better to annotate first and then highlight or underline second, so you remember why you found it important.

Keep a double-entry journal (also called a "dialectical notebook"). This strategy, coined by composition scholar Ann E. Berthoff, involves using a separate notebook with one line down the center, where one side is an observation or quote from the reading, and the other side is a reflection on that observation or quote. You could do this digitally in Word, Google Docs, or other word-processing applications by creating a table, or you can just use paper and pen. On the left side, you write a quote or paraphrase of something you read (along with the page number you found it and, to make it even easier when reviewing later, some information like location on the page). Then, on the right side, you write a response in the same way you might write in an annotation. See below for an example:

Make reflective memos. As you read, you might encounter something that gives you either great ideas or a lot of frustration. Lean into those moments to do some writing. If you read something that gives you a lot of good ideas for a writing assignment, start writing now. Try a paragraph and see where it goes. You might also read something you just don't understand, or you might feel frustrated. Write in response to that, too. Write out what you find difficult to understand and why (which is what composition scholars Marolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue call a "difficulty paper"). The point is to "identify and begin to hypothesize the reasons for any difficulty you might be experiencing as you read" so you can get closer to understanding (Salvatori and Donahue 9). Writing things out might help you toward better understanding, or help you come up with questions you might want to ask your instructor (or simply questions for yourself to continue to engage!).

Take note of unfamiliar words and look them up if they seem important. Some writing is just really hard to understand without knowing what the key terms mean! You might also take note of familiar words used in ways you haven't seen before and may have technical meanings different from the common meaning (e.g., "grading" in the context of school means a letter or number that is supposed to represent some kind of evaluation of school work; "grading" in the context of construction means making soil level). See if a dictionary might have the alternative definition, or use a search engine with the word along with another word or phrase describing the subject of the reading (e.g., "grading" and "engineering").

During easier parts, speed up. During difficult parts, slow down. During especially difficult parts, try reading out loud—sometimes our brains will quickly skip over things when reading silently.

Re-read. Everyone, including your professors, has to do this often. Whether it is a sentence, paragraph, or the whole text that's confusing, you may have to keep returning to it. This is why annotations can be helpful! You might read faster or slower, more or less thoroughly, depending on where you are in the text or what reading (your first vs. your fourth reading).

Remind yourself that it’s okay if you don’t understand what you are reading or you get frustrated. Don’t give up. This is how reading about difficult topics goes—skilled readers, including your professors, get confused and frustrated, too. They just have more experience reading the sorts of texts you are likely only beginning to read. We are all always reaching for meaning, getting the most of what we can get, and keeping going. It is a challenge, and it should be difficult. If your readings could talk, they would genuinely say, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Finishing Up: Strategies after Reading

Returning to the "big picture" after having read something can help you figure out what you can do with a text. Without a purpose, it is hard for us to remember what we read because we lose connection to our lives (i.e., what are you going to do with this reading? What does it help you with?). Here are some things you can try after you read—you might want to do these strategies immediately after reading or take a break first:

Review your writing: highlights, underlines, annotations, double-entry journal, reflective memos, and/or spontaneous notes.

Choose three (or any number of) ideas you highlighted, underlined, or noted while reading and keep writing. Why are these things important to you? What more can you say about them? How could you use them in class discussions? How could you use them for a writing assignment or exam response? The goal is to connect the reading to work you'll do in the future.

Using your notes, write a 200-word summary of what you just read.

Passage-based paper. Choose a passage (about 3–5 sentences) that you identified as especially interesting, challenging, and/or important. Copy down the passage. Examine it closely, thinking carefully about its "language, tone, and construction" (Carillo 133). Finish your reflection by connecting your close examination of the passage to the text as a whole.

Reading journal. Reflect on the reading approaches you used, how helpful they were, their limitations, if you had to abandon one and switch to another (and why, and how you might alter approaches for your next reading (Carillo 135–37).

Because we believe annotation is such a crucial practice to work on while reading, the next section more directly outlines steps you can take while annotating.

Tips on Annotation

Annotation = A note one makes on or about their reading.

When you pause while reading/viewing/listening, this could be a natural sign that it is time to take a note: whether you are frustrated or curious, a pause means something worth noting in terms of content or in terms of your own processes and feelings.

Your annotation can be a question. It is okay not to understand something!

Put new ideas into your own words. This helps comprehension and is more memorable than using the exact language of what you read.

Make connections to personal experience, other readings you have done, or other parts of the text. We understand new parts of the world through what we already know.

Notice things that are repeated and think about why they are being repeated. New contexts to understand? A central idea being emphasized?

Think about assumptions the writer/composer is making. What is unstated, and how is that useful for any part of the text you are reading?

Is something ambiguous? Does it have multiple meanings? Note things that have several possible meanings.

Reread your notes after you are done reading/listening/viewing, but also reread notes before you do the next activity related to that text.

Digital vs. Print Reading (or, Digital and Print Reading)

While digital and print reading may not have stark differences, there are some important discoveries about the "digital reading condition" that are worth trying to understand (Engberg and Sougaard Pedersen 121). Generally, what you can do while reading on a computational device vs. reading a physical book will look similar overall (e.g., annotation). However, the materiality of the reading (e.g., scrolling a screen vs. turning a page) can slightly alter a reader's approach (Engberg and Sougaard Pedersen 121). Composition scholar Tanya K. Rodrigue catalogs several digital reading strategies for reading on devices instead of in books or papers (252–254):

Previewing: As with previewing a print text, spend some time exploring the digital text to see what features it has and how those features can inform your reading approach (e.g., menu choices, interactive features, scroll bars) (252).

Use three reading strategies that complement one another: Close reading, hyperreading, and machine reading. In addition to the close reading strategies described above, in digital form, you can also "hyperread" and use digital tools to help you. Hyperreading involves using a combination of different kinds of quicker approaches to reading: looking for keywords, skimming, choosing a few passages to close read, shifting back and forth between multiple texts to read when it seems relevant to do so, and scanning to "identify items of interest" (253) Along with hyperreading and close reading, you can use machine reading, which involves using "online software (e.g., word clouds that display word-frequency graphics) to identify patterns in texts" (253). One free option for machine reading to explore is Voyant Tools. This website allows you to enter text and toggle between different ways of analyzing it in terms of patterns of words (if the text is able to be copy/pasted).

Paying attention to genre. This involves learning "to draw on genre awareness (an understanding of multimodality, recurrent reading practices, and the nature of genres as interactive and rhetorical when engaging with a digital text" (254). Reading with genre awareness for digital texts entails thinking about the similarities and differences between a screen and printed page respective to the genre of the text, keeping in mind that "digital genres invite recurring reading practices" while also remembering that distinct genres and situations require different practices, and that "genres are multimodal"—meaning that you have to consider features beyond alphanumeric writing (e.g., images, audio, video, design features) (251). For example, you may be reading a forum on Reddit, a news article with links to other articles, or a TikTok video with comments. Reading any of these texts means scrolling up and down, clicking other links, and connecting other texts (e.g., comments) to the original text. At the same time, however, each of these texts are all different genres that have different conventions that also need to be considered (and they are genres unique to digital technologies). What might be conventional in a Reddit post may be unconventional in a news article, and so on.

"Internet reciprocal" reading. This strategy involves getting into a group to navigate digital texts and then using what was learned in your own individual projects. In other words, you read in groups and try to learn from one another what might work best (252).

Use online software to help with focus and comprehension. There are programs out there (e.g., ad blockers, readability software, screen readers) that can help with managing distractions, simplifying or aiding the reading process, and organizing elements unique to digital reading (e.g., hyperlinks) (252).

Because managing distractions and attention are especially important for keeping up with reading, we close this chapter with some strategies for managing distractions during reading (or writing!).

Distraction Management

Sometimes what makes reading (and writing, for that matter) difficult is maintaining focus on it. Below are several strategies for managing distractions while you read:

Timer/Scheduling Techniques

Pomodoro method: This method involves working in cycles. For example, you can set a work cycle for 25 minutes and then a "break" for five minutes. After four of these cycles, you can then schedule a longer break (e.g., 15 minutes). The idea here is that through planning, you end up providing yourself more quality break time and more sustained work time.

Scheduling check-ins (e.g., email, texts): If you schedule time every day for nonreading work, you'll be less tempted to do that work as a distraction away from your writing.

List Making

A “parking lot”: Similar to the last item, this method (adapted from Dr. Kimberly Helms) involves combatting tasks that interrupt the current work we want to do (i.e., reading) by having a separate sheet of paper or word-processing document on our computer near us as we read. Whenever we think of something (e.g., I need to text my friend about birthday plans, I need to work on my math homework), we write it in our parking lot to do later and not now.

Getting Things Done: This prioritizes doing small tasks up front. You start your work day or work block by listing as many of the tasks you need to do as possible. Then you complete the easiest ones up front before moving to the bigger ticket items. Getting things done boosts your confidence and makes you feel good, so you can move on to the big thing (e.g., reading, writing) with a good attitude. You can also think about this in terms of reading or writing tasks rather than any tasks (e.g., setting margins, coming up with section titles, completing a reference list).

Rituals

As we are successful with a certain routine, it can be a good practice to repeat it (until it gets stale). Hopefully, our brain starts to associate productivity with repetition around:

Time/Place: For some people, this means the same time and place every time you read or write, or just being consistent for an extended period of time (say, a few weeks). If you are more alert during one time of day, then maybe a coffee shop from 3–5 p.m. is a block of time and place you want to prioritize.

Food/Drink: Scheduling what food and drink you will consume can be motivating and comforting. Some foods, too, may boost brain function (e.g., dark chocolate).

Noise: Some people need silence, while others find the noise of people or nature comforting and thus helpful for focusing. Music can be helpful in tuning out other noise distractions or motivating you to pound some keys on your laptop. Some music, like Baroque, follows roughly the same beats per minute as the human heart and may be relaxing in a way that centers your mind and body.

Meditation or mindfulness; quality breaks: If you find meditation or mindfulness practices relaxing or helpful with focus, you might schedule time to engage in these practices (e.g., during a five-minute break in a Pomodoro cycle). You might also make sure your breaks aren't engaging in the same sorts of cognitive and physical activity that your reading or writing engages. So, instead of looking at a screen, you might take a walk or do some stretches.

Objects: Playing with objects (anything! A pair of dice, a pipe cleaner, a fidget spinner or cube, play dough) or doodling can help with anxiety more than scrolling through social media. You can even do some of these things as you read or write.

Writing aids: Having the right pen, the right notebook, using the right desk—whatever makes you feel like it is the time to read or write can help here.

Reading/Writing Partners or Groups

Having a good accountability partner or accountability group can be a huge boost to productivity. It is positive peer pressure: someone to check in with, to struggle through writing together, to talk through an idea. Just make sure this person or these people won't be distracting. A good friend is not the same thing as a good reading or writing partner; it could be that your dynamic will make it too easy to distract each other. Finally, a writing partner can be furry (or feathery, or scaly): sometimes our pets can be great in helping us feel better as we despair over our reading or writing! Reading and writing can feel very solitary and lonely, so having the support of other people or animals can go a long way toward helping you get energized and focused.

As mentioned before, these are things to try out! We hope you can continue to experiment throughout the semester (and beyond) to find ways to read and write in ways that best help your learning.

Works Cited

Berthoff, Ann E. “How We Construe is How We Construct.” CompPile, 1982, pp. 84–86.

Bunn, Michael. “Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 64, no. 3, 2013, pp. 496–516.

Carillo, Ellen C. Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer. Utah State UP, 2015.

Engberg, Maria, and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen. “Deep, Focused, and Critical Reading Between Media.” The Digital Reading Condition, edited by Maria Engberg, Iben Have, and Birgitte Sougaard Pedersen, Routledge, 2023, pp. 113–121.

Rodrigue, Tanya K. “Digital Reading: Genre Awareness as a Tool for Reading.” Pedagogy, vol. 17, no. 2, 2017, pp. 235–257.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Patricia Donahue. The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.

2.2 On Writing as Style and Entering a Conversation

Show the following:

Adjust appearance:

Notes