I have always liked writing courses even in my high school because they were very engaging and intresting. The course is called a"writing" course for a reason because it entails writing texts, stories and more. I personally do not beleive in reading to write. i beleive that reading helps for ideas when you write. In my opinion, reading won't magically teach me how to write perhaps give me a better idea but not teach me completly. While reading is good in other subjects such as biology, chemistry and such it is because they are mostly information to be retained, you wont be writing an article about it in everyday life. However, composition or writing does require you to write alot, except for some reason the curriculum entails alot of reading. Writing takes practice and not reading. I beleive the syllabus should be rewritten and the currciulum redefined.
Please comment if you can.
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The role of reading is, honestly, an ongoing debate in writing studies. When we rewrote the course objectives for our writing classes, for instance, we decided to take "critical reading" out of the objectives. But we didn't do so because we thought reading isn't related to writing. After all, the type of writing that academics do in the humanities is often referred to as "close reading." We did it because we felt that reading was a basic assumption of every course.
ReplyDeleteI think there's a difference here in the purpose of the reading being done. In a biology or chemistry class you read to access information, to find facts and details you're meant to learn and remember.
Reading in the humanities is not like that. In the humanities, we read to understand how the text is put together and to find the ideas or "gaps" that we can base our own writing on.
There's an experiment that I think draws a parallel here. Two groups of people were walked through a house. The first group was told they were prospective buyers of the house; the second group was told they were prospective robbers of the house. Each group noticed different things. The first group noticed the age of the appliances, the quality of the flooring, and so on. The second group noticed the location of windows, the presence of security features, and so on.
So, what I'm suggesting here is that reading in a writing class asks you to look differently at texts--as objects of analysis, as models, as incomplete arguments, etc.--rather than as sources of information. Texts in some classes are authoritative sources of information; texts in a humanities class are things to be argued with.
No one would ever sit down to write a film without ever having seen a movie. Yet we often ask students to write academic essays without ever actually having read one (or thought about how they are written, and how the way they are written is different from other texts). As Bartholomae argues, the methods of meaning-making that academics employ are difficult to grasp, even for professors.
I think this is a good question, though, and it could definitely be developed into the topic of your research paper.