7.5: Merely a Misconception

From the elementary level to secondary schooling, educators
are consistent upon the insistence that their students read
more because it will help improve their vocabulary, writing,
etc. School districts have even gone as far as instituting incentive
programs in order to encourage reading (i.e. Accelerated
Reader or A.R.) or otherwise force it on students. However,
the question here is, does reading more really help; and if so,
does reading more difficult material play a role in one’s writing
level?

. . . I believe that one’s writing can be improved through
reading and that in some part, your reading level does affect
your writing capability, but it is not always the case. Different
people learn differently. Writing requires practice all on
its own in order to better oneself at it and requires the reading
of not just more difficult pieces but a multitude of pieces.
In order to improve one’s writing one needs to be exposed to
different varieties of writing in order to hone the ability of
comprehension. Everyone has their own method and style of
writing, however no one style of writing is original. It is just
like art, an artist can no longer claim their work to be original
because everything has been done before. What can be done
is to take what others have given us and use it to our advantage;
learn from it.

As Brittany tries to work out the relationship between reading and writing, the tension that strikes me is between her idea of how art blends original work with old work and how that might contribute to “universal characteristics.” She talked in her blog and in-group workshops about how reading about writing studies challenged her to think more about what happened to us in class on a daily basis. She was hyper-reflective, and as a result, she turned to look more closely at pre-college testing, the place where reading and writing ability get measured without an explanation for how they link or work together.

Invention Potential 4: Finding a Question before an Answer

For Project 2-Questioning Writing (Studies), I asked students to build out of their Project 1:

Think about how your interests connect to the field of writing
studies we’ve been reading, blogging, talking, and thinking
about. What I want you to do for Project 2 is to develop a
question you have related to writing studies as we are coming
to understand it through our work so far in English 1301.
Once we’ve discussed that question in several ways—class
discussion, peer review, blog postings and comments—you’ll
investigate that question, and then write a report of your investigation
in which you will:

• Explain how you came to the question, why it is important,
and what it involves;

• Describe how you investigated it, both in terms of the
strengths of your design and its limitations;

• Discuss your findings and their significance for one or
more invested stakeholders, and brainstorm about possible ways to adapt what you’ve learned by investigating Project
2 to a public Project 3 that puts your findings and your
theories about reading, writing, and/or learning to work.

In the educational universe there is a perpetual cycle: High
school, the dawn of junior/senior year, then the counselors and
their persistent hounding “Have you signed up for your ACT/
SAT . . . make sure to sign up!” College Entrance Exams:
what exactly do these three words entail? To some, they are
the factor that will basically determine the rest of their lives.
The question I pose, however, is: Does the ACT accurately
determine (i.e. my) readiness for college level courses, in this
case, in terms of English?

. . . These tests assume “writing is writing,” as stated in the
Downs and Wardle article “Teaching about Writing, Righting
Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First Year Composition’ as
‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” Downs and Wardle point
out that “The content-versus-form misconception—as old as
FYC itself—appears in standardized testing, with the SAT
‘writing’ test giving better scores to longer essays and completely
discounting factual errors” (555). This serves as further
testament to my belief that these tests are inadequate in determining
one’s readiness for college. In college, it is not about
length, it is about content. While some instances may require
you to write an essay of a limited word count, it is still what
you are writing about that is the most important factor. . . .
It’s time for a full-scale renovation.

Brittany is doing a lot of what I want to see in this early draft—making connections between the position in a text and her experiences, tweaking a found challenge to suit her own beliefs, values, and interests, and explaining evidence. She’s doing all this as a concurrently enrolled student living in both worlds of “readiness,” but she was not an exception in her class. In a mixed class of high school and college students, one thing they learned immediately from the required blog interactions was that their assumed likenesses—as students, as people from the same geographic area, as a class made entirely of students with Hispanic backgrounds—were much less interesting than the differences in how they had experienced public education, writing, and learning.

Reading about Brittany’s writing, I don’t know how connected you feel to your first year writing class and your writing in it. I do know that you are an expert in experiencing and surviving pre-college education, that you are a reader, that you are a writer, even if you don’t like how academics describe those identities. And I know you have questions about your learning, about writing, about reading, and about why you think the way you do about all three. When you find a way to articulate those questions, to make them bridges to how you write or what you have to write about, you are no longer writing and reading because you have to. I think you start writing and reading because you need to.

Invention Potential 5: Adapting Forms as Public Invention

I have to stress here that Brittany was not a closet document designer, a trained graphic artist, or an expert in testing beyond her role as testing subject before our class. For Project 3, she produced a mockup of an ACT exam reading and question set (which I’ve abbreviated).

DIRECTIONS: The passage in this test is followed by several questions. After reading the passage, choose the best answer to each question and fill in the corresponding oval on your answer document. You may refer to the passage as often as necessary.

Rhetoric & Composition: This passage is adapted from the article “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’ by Douglas Downs & Elizabeth Wardle (©2007 by Douglas Downs & Elizabeth Wardle). *This article was part of the required reading curriculum in a first-semester university class (1301: Rhetoric & Composition).