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Excellence and Expertise Research and Innovation Student Success

National Reading Month: Expand Your Ideas About Reading and Writing

March is National Reading Month, a celebration that encourages reading for all ages and promotes reading as a key feature for learning, social, and professional development.

Excellence and Expertise Research and Innovation Student Success

National Reading Month: Expand Your Ideas About Reading and Writing

Becoming more mindful about reading-writing connections

March is National Reading Month, a celebration that encourages reading for all ages and promotes reading as a key feature for learning, social, and professional development.

As we celebrate the value of reading, it’s also important to remember its connection to writing. Even though most educational settings teach reading and writing separately, these activities rarely occur independently of one another. Lizzie Hutton, director of the Howe Writing Center (the writing-focused arm of Miami’s Howe Center for Writing Excellence), continues to research the reading-writing connection. She regularly examines college students’ diverse reading and writing practices, their transfer of literacy knowledge across contexts, and the most effective means for enabling peer support for engaged knowledge building.

Here are some takeaways from Hutton’s research to help you connect and boost your reading and writing practices:

Reading is not only a school-based activity.

“Reading is not just sitting down and reading a novel cover to cover. One thing that’s really important for educators to do is just raise awareness that reading really is already everywhere. We read texts from friends, recipes and instructions, street signs, and emails. What can help students with their reading is recognizing all the reading skills — and goals for reading — that they already have in place, and then building on those skills and goals to meet new demands.”

Engaged reading always has a purpose — a ‘why.’

“It’s also important for students to not just think about what they read but to think about why they’re reading — the purpose that they’re bringing to the writing task. In the writing center, for example, we use reading to help students revise and to help them think about what they’ve already written in a new way; but that’s a particular kind of attention you bring to text that’s different from the kind of reading you might do when you read a book for pleasure or when you read a recipe to cook a meal.”

Recognize that the attention applied to reading can transfer to writing.

“I study the literacy theorist, Louise Rosenblatt, whose work helps us better understand how reading operates, and that kind of attention you bring to reading can transfer over to the kinds of attention you bring to your writing. It’s important that students think about all the different kinds of reading they can and will do in and out of the classroom — reading to revise a text or learn from a text, reading critically or in order to respond to something, reading to synthesize information. Thinking about the different ways we read then gives us insight into the different kinds of attention we also bring to different writing tasks — and how reading critically can help us exercise the muscles we use when we write in a more critical mode.”

Think about reading and writing in a more expansive way.

“Students need lots of opportunities to do all different kinds of reading and writing for their classes — so not just reading scholarship, but reading from newspapers, reading from novels, and reading from Twitter feeds — so they can develop a strong sense of the range of types of textual engagement that are already all around them. Sometimes our world looks really narrow. Reading is a doorway into a much bigger view — one that enlarges our visions of others and of ourselves. It’s amazing to think not only of all the texts that are available to read, but of all the different kinds of meaning readers can make from those texts. Remind students that there’s a huge world out there of stuff to read and empower them to discover what those different texts might be — texts that might change their whole outlook.”

Make an appointment at the Howe Writing Center.

If you’re looking for writing (and reading!) support, check out the Howe Writing Center, which offers flexible appointment options to fit your needs and schedule. Hutton mentions, “The Howe Writing Center is a wonderful resource where students can talk to peers about their writing in a collaborative, judgment-free zone. We support writers on any and all tasks they may be working on to help them develop a strong sense of themselves as writers.”

Happy reading and writing to all!