Writing and reading are connected and interrelated skills. Therefore, as a WAC Initiative, we support a Reading Across the Curriculum pedagogy. The problems students have with their writing assignments often stem from obstacles they face with reading. Students who need help understanding the chapter or article they have been assigned will find it nearly impossible to write an effective essay about it. The strategies you will find here will help you bolster students’ reading and writing skills.
Writing and Reading Are Related by the Writing Study Group of the NCTE Executive Committee, November 2004.
Writing and reading are related. People who read a lot have a much easier time getting better at writing. In order to write a particular kind of text, it helps if the writer has read that kind of text. To take on a specific style of language, the writer needs to have read that language, to have heard it in her mind, so that she can listen to it again in order to compose it.
Writing can also help people become better readers. In their earliest writing experiences, children listen for the relationships of sounds to letters, contributing significantly to their phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge. Writers must also learn how texts are structured because they have to create them. The experience of plotting a short story, organizing a research report, or making line breaks in a poem permits the writer, as a reader, to approach new reading experiences with more informed eyes.
Additionally, reading is a vital source of information and ideas. For writers to contribute fully to a given topic or to be effective in a given situation, they must be familiar with what previous writers have said. Reading also creates a sense of what one’s audience knows or expects on a topic.
Using Reading and Writing in the Classroom
- Reading Strategies
Pre-reading, reading, and post-reading strategies. - Reading to Write
Reading, note-taking, and writing strategies for when you need to use reading assignments or sources as the springboard for writing a paper. - Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success
An article linking reading and its effective use in college courses to student academic success. - Fry Readability Formula
A tool that allows instructors to determine the reading level of any text they wish to use in a course. - Sample Assignment “Charges of Bias”
A sample reading assignment with an article and activities. - Sample Assignment: “Joy of Reading”
A sample reading assignment with an article and activities.