Strengthening the Reading-Writing Connection

Writing about reading assignments helps students to create a “companion text.” Students see that a critical reader is a kind of author. We can invite students to experiment with a variety of companion texts:

Ö “Talk-back” notes: jotting down important points, confusing spots, places of disagreement as if talking to the author.

Ö Reading logs: making regular, free-choice responses that link personal experiences with the content of texts.

Ö Focused reading notes: tracking a key theme or concept in a flow chart or under column headings.

Ö Summary/response notebooks: dividing a page in half to summarize on one side and to comment on the other.

Ö Interviews: inventing questions & using a text to provide the “interview responses.”

Ö Genre switching: responding creatively to a traditional text format, e.g. the autobiography of a pancreas, a poem about an isosceles triangle, a newsletter about what students learned in a 3-week period in chemistry.

Ö Microthemes: summarizing reading assignments concisely on note cards.

Ö Translations: writing a difficult passage in one’s own words, deliberately avoiding any language that the author uses.

Ö Explications of visual aids: interpreting the meaning of a graph, map, table, image, etc.—or designing a visual aid to clarify a particularly challenging textual passage.

Ö Multiple-choice or short-essay questions: turning in weekly questions on reading assignments that become part of an exam the next week.

Ö Headline essays: Collecting newspaper or magazine headlines on a topic (e.g. math in the news) and writing a short summary of how those headlines add up.

Visual to Verbal Mini-projects: Putting together posters, power-point slides, or handouts that summarize a reading assignment. Students orally present, then write reflections on what they learned.

Let’s Do It: Writing/Reading

Look again at the subject-area excerpts. From suggestions above, let’s choose one that we could apply to the excerpt that most closely resembles our subject areas.

1) Let’s write an assignment prompt for that text.

2) Then we’ll each exchange our prompt with someone else at our table (from another subject area) who will write a response to our prompt.

3) When everyone at our table finishes, each of us will describe the prompt and read our written responses.