Making the Connection: Reading and Writing Together






Making the Connection:
Reading and Writing Together

by

Lori Mayo

for English Journal March, 2000


The bell rings, signifying the beginning of our first class. We size each other up like opponents in a boxing ring. In my head, Frank Sinatra sings "New York, New York"—"If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere…" I’m playing to a tough crowd, trying to sell reading and writing to a group of inner city high school kids. After a short spiel on what they really want to know, how to get the bathroom pass, I tell them that, in my class, they will write like writers and read like writers. A few quiet groans, and Luther says, "Whatta ya mean? We’re not writers." You’ll see, I think, you’ll see.

APPRENTICESHIPS & GENRE STUDIES

I can still remember learning the word apprentice. 1972. My family took an educational vacation to Williamsburg, Virginia. The blacksmith, I learned, had an apprentice. I immediately thought that made sense. How else, after all, would someone learn how to do something? Our classroom structures need to offer opportunities for students to apprentice themselves as makers of literature to the literary artists whose work they admire (Bomer 107). It is not enough to tell students that reading more will make them better writers; the reading/writing connection needs to be made explicit.

A genre study is one way to bring reading and writing together in the classroom. Reading and writing in one particular genre allows students to understand the conventions of a particular genre, and use that understanding in their own writing. After students have responded to a text as readers, they can look at the writer’s craft and figure out how that craft helps to evoke the reader’s response.

For each genre that we study, I provide examples of that genre that we all look at together. I also ask students to find examples of the genre on their own. Ideally, students should find their own texts to use as models. Non-fiction articles seem to be the easiest for my students to find, and the ones they choose are about areas that interest them, in magazines that they usually read.

From my own writing experience, I know that it is useful to find a piece that I admire, try to figure out what the writer did that makes me admire that piece, and try to do the same in my own work. Indoctrinated with the fear of plagiarism, some students need to be assured that it is acceptable to imitate another writer’s style. I model this for them by showing them a piece that I’d written, and the article that I used as a model for my writing. I point out what attracted me to the article, like a lead that brought me into the scene in a you-are-here kind of way, and the conventions, like subheadings, that I learned from the article.

UPPING THE ANTE: READING CRITICALLY

In a memoir genre study, we read Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. Wolff ends a chapter with the following paragraph:

    Dwight drove us down to Seattle early the next morning. He stopped on the bridge leading out of camp so we could see the salmon in the water below. He pointed them out to us, dark shapes among the rocks. They had come all the way from the ocean to spawn here, Dwight said, and then they would die. They were already dying. The change from salt to fresh water had turned their flesh rotten. Long strips of it hung off their bodies, waving in the current. (75)

My students and I look very carefully at this paragraph. We question this paragraph. Why would Wolff mention the salmon? On the surface, it seems to have little to do with the flow of the story. We discuss one aspect of memoir: although, for the most part, it is non-fiction, it reads like fiction. In the context of the story, we can see this paragraph as

representative detail-- as symbolism, or foreshadowing. Wolff and his mom, initially hopeful that their new life with Dwight is going to be the answer to their problems, are starting to sense that problems will arise. As readers, we can see that the writer trusts our intelligence enough to assume we can understand his intention.

The move from a surface reading of the text to reading on a deeper level is a sophisticated move for a reader to make. It is one I assumed my students did automatically, one I didn’t think I had to teach them. When I repeatedly felt frustrated by their surface reading of texts, I realized that I needed to teach them how to do closer readings. Looking at the writer’s craft was the first step to critical reading. Trying this type of writing ourselves was the next step.

WRITING LIKE WRITERS: WHOLE CLASS INQUIRY AND INDIVIDUAL MODELS

I asked my students to use the paragraph from This Boy’s Life as a model for their writing. They were writing short memoir pieces and I wanted them to try to end their pieces with a paragraph like Wolff’s. Candice, in a piece about sneaking out of her house to visit her boyfriend, ended her piece by writing:

    I walked out of the house, and I felt the sun shining down on me. The warm breeze felt good on my arms, swinging at my sides. As I turned the corner, the weather changed suddenly. The clouds came out and it started to get cold. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

Nadja, in the final paragraph of a piece about leaving home for her first interview at a college campus, writes:

    The rain stopped and the sun appeared. Walking across campus, I saw a bird’s nest in the tree. A sparrow was nudging her babies out of the tree. The young birds flew to the ground, and seemed wobbly on their feet. Looking up to the tree as if for encouragement, the birds skittered around on the grass. Finally, they found what they were after: plump, juicy worms. Success at last.

Becoming makers of complex texts may help students to become more capable readers of complex texts.

A writing teacher needs to have easy access to literature for students to turn to for help in their writing. If I am familiar with a few texts in a particular genre we are studying, I can easily have photocopies at hand and make suggestions from those texts. Often, especially in a study of memoir, what we read will influence what my students want to write about.

Leela, in her memoir piece, wanted to describe her disappointment about the fact that her mother didn’t attend her junior high school graduation. I reminded her of the way Maya Angelou built up the anticipation of graduation in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. That anticipation, I explained to her, was what made us feel how letdown she was at the outcome. After rereading Angelou’s chapter, she backed up to the beginning of her piece, and described in great detail the process of getting ready for her big day, writing:

    One day I was sitting in the lunchroom and the principal called out my name along with the names of ten other people. All of a sudden, thoughts started rushing through my head. What did I do? Was I in trouble? But when he brought me into the auditorium, he told me that I would be receiving the Principal’s Achievement Award at graduation. I was so excited. I felt like I was walking on air.

    My father took me to pick out the perfect dress. It was pale yellow, covered with sunflowers. The day before graduation, my grandmother took me to the beauty parlor. I had my hair done in curls all over my head. I could hardly stop looking at myself in the mirror, picturing myself accepting the award.

    My father and I left the house to go to the graduation ceremony. I walked to my seat and waited. When the principal called my name, I hurried across the stage. I looked into the audience and I didn’t see my mother. I had to fight back the tears.

She was able to achieve her purpose by recognizing that readers would be more likely to feel her pain if we first felt her excitement. Studying the structure that Angelou used helped her to understand this concept.

LEARNING TO LISTEN TO THE MUSIC

Georgia Heard, in a keynote address at the 1997 Nassau Reading Council Conference at Hofstra University, talked about poetry as the foundation of all writing. She suggested listening to the music of all words, and applying tools from poetry to prose. Heard’s message made sense to me. I’d spent time during poetry genre studies pointing out techniques such as metaphor; why not do the same in prose?

As part of an independent reading project, Natasha read James McBride’s The Color of Water. In response to the assignment, which required the students to pay close attention to the writer’s craft, Natasha wrote:

    There are many examples of the author’s craft in this book. McBride uses imagery, metaphors, and similes. I recognize The author’s use of sensory images when he back-tracked to his mother’s hometown in Suffolk, Virginia. McBride wrote that "the smell of azaleas and the creeping loneliness that climbed over me as I poked around Suffolk had begun to suffocate me."(223)

Natasha discussed six or seven other examples from the book that she felt were representative of the author’s craft. Reading with an eye toward craft, and being aware of poetic writing in prose, affected Natasha’s writing. In her piece, "Drowned By Death," Natasha wrote:

    "Tasha, your mother died this morning," my father said. At that very moment, a sudden anger, rising like steam, poured out of my broken heart. All my father could do was hold me as I wept. There was such a sinking feeling that came over me; I felt as if I was going down into the darkness. Part of me died when my mother died. I must admit, I was angry with my mother for a long while afterwards. I was angry, but more than that I missed her. I was angry, but more than that I felt like I lost my best friend.

Many of my students incorporated repetition and other poetic techniques into their prose after looking for it in published writing.

While I was reading Karen’s piece, about growing up in an unsafe neighborhood, I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu. Karen ended her piece by writing, "For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be sick and tired of being sick and tired." This sounded familiar to me, so I asked her if we’d read something like this together. Karen said no. I couldn’t stop thinking about it; the line haunted me for days. Finally, I found the source. While reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, we looked carefully at one sentence toward the end of the book. Angelou writes, "Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware." While I discussed this sentence in terms of its meaning to Angelou’s life, the structure of the sentence stuck with Karen. Without even realizing it, she was able to use the rhythm in her own writing.

GETTING STARTED AND REAPING REWARDS

The key to success in bringing writing and reading together in the classroom may be as simple as reading shorter texts, using texts that students can imagine themselves writing, looking closely at writing, and talking about writers’ decisions. I can't expect to give my students Pride and Prejudice in the hopes that it will affect their writing. Like most teachers, when I read a magazine article, a short story, an essay, or newspaper article that seems like it would interest my students, I clip it, copy it, file it, and use it in class. These become my greatest resources.

One Sunday, I came across one of my best finds in The New York Times Magazine: a piece called "Underground Dads," by Wil Haygood. The author described growing up without a father, and the "good black men" that were there to fill in for him. As soon as I read it, I knew this piece would speak to many of my students. It triggered countless numbers of essays on similar topics. Juan, a student who constantly complained of having "nothing to write about," wrote a piece he called "Substitutes: The Real Life Actors" about his three uncles who helped his mother to raise him. Each paragraph, like Haygood’s, described the ways in which each of his uncles taught him life lessons. Juan graduated, joined the navy, and returned to visit last year, still talking with pride about that piece. His reading of Haygood’s piece informed his writing, in both content and style.

When we look at literature together, I have my students choose one sentence in a text that seems to hold a significant chunk of the overall meaning of the text. We share these sentences, usually in small groups, and talk about the way they represent a theme in the text or seem to communicate the author’s attitude toward a particular character, an action, or the setting. This close, sentence-by-sentence analysis, serves as a reminder that a writer makes careful decisions about every word, and that each sentence contributes to the whole. This is an important thing to remember as both readers and writers.

After completing each writing assignment, my students write reflective papers that include a self-assessment component, their reflections on the writing process, and plans for the next writing assignment. In her first reflective paper, Leela wrote:

    Soon I will be writing my second piece. I’m thinking of writing about my life and adding some fictional stories that represent who I am. Kind of like This Boy’s Life. If you think about it, the book is really not something that a lot of people would actually want to read, but I love reading the little stories that he tells. Even though some of it may be fiction, it helps me to understand what kind of life he lived and what kind of person he was. I want to do something similar in my memoir so that when it is read, people can get an under- standing of who I am and where I came from. Using foreshadowing in the beginning of a memoir sounds like a good idea. The literature we read helped me get a feel for how a memoir piece is written. Next time I’d like to use more metaphors to make the writing better.

Encouraging students to experience reading like writers allows them to internalize the sound and structure of good writing. In turn, they will be able to craft better pieces and

read with a better understanding of the author’s purpose. Nobody is more pleased or surprised by the results of their efforts than the students are. "Check it out," Luther says, pointing to his piece in our class magazine, "I’m a writer."


Works Cited

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1970.

Bomer, Randy. Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle & High School.

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995.

Haygood, Wil. "Underground Dads." The Sunday New York Times Magazine

30 November 1997: 156.

McBride, James. The Color of Water. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.

Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life. New York: Harper & Rowe, 1989.


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