In my English content methods class this week, I have asked my students to
think about the connections possible between reading and writing as processes,
and to do some reading from one artifact in the National Writing Project’s
resource archive on Writing to Read.
Because I’m reading and writing with them, I am sharing my thoughts on a piece
from the collection, too. I read “Style Study: One Connection Between Reading and Writing” by Rebekah Caplan. Published in 1987, this piece predates my own teaching career, but it
has resonance for me as a teacher of teachers and as a teacher of writing. It
rings true to some of my own high school classroom teaching practices—and offers
ideas which maintain currency even today. Caplan’s short article provides me with a clear reminder of
the interconnectedness of reading and writing—and how teachers must make those
connections explicit in ways that students can apply and use.
Caplan elaborates on ways she merges
writing and reading practices in a unit on The Great Gatsby. She outlines
several activities for student writing and response, including one in which
students create “showing paragraphs” from “telling sentences,” an activity
that I used when I taught ninth grade English and still use in developmental
composition courses. Caplan also elaborates on how she asks students to emulate
Fitzgerald’s style, moving from mimicry to analysis, and developing their own
styles along the way.
The first important take-away, for me, relates to the way
Caplan provides opportunities for students to learn how to give and get
feedback. When Caplan’s students compose and share aloud their short, “showing
paragraphs,” they hear from their teacher the language of response, and they
are able to draw evidence from one another’s’ texts to support their thinking
about quality writing.
It strikes me that learning to give feedback using short,
exploratory pieces, which are lower investment for students, bridges the way
into feedback for works in which students are more personally invested. The
opportunity to practice helpful peer feedback with short responses, rather than
with long, more personally relevant pieces, can help novice writers better understand
what kind of commentary is helpful and appropriate in a low-stakes way. Over
the course of the unit, then, students move from analysis of Gatsby to personal reflection writing
that explores some of the text’s themes in their own lives. Allowing students
the opportunity to practice writing in “new and different ‘voices’” helps them
to hone and develop their own styles. Additionally, it allows them to go deeply
into understanding the style of the works they read.
The second important idea that grows out of my reading of
this piece relates to the kind of co-created meaning that discussions about literature
can so fruitfully foster. Caplan describes in detail the ways she helps
students to analyze Gatsby by stepping back and allowing students to lead the
learning. When confusion arises, “instead of giving them the answer,” Caplan
asks the group, and when one student elaborates his understanding, it becomes “a
learning experience for those who don’t understand.” In this way, the
discussion evolves so that “one student’s insight has influenced another’s
thinking and ultimate understanding of the passage.”
What I love most about this article is the way Caplan
seamlessly moves students through the interconnected processes of reading,
writing, and thinking. Students mirror Fitzgerald’s style and structure
patterns (Caplan gives explicit examples from Gatsby and from student work) and in doing so, they engage as
writers themselves, reading, processing, internalizing, and producing texts of
their own that are both interpretive and exploratory, revealing something about
style and understanding, providing insight into the craft of writing and the
understanding of a reading. Reading this piece makes me want to teach Gatsby again, just to try out Caplan’s
techniques.
Caplan, R. “Style Study: One Connection Between Reading and
Writing.” Writing to Read: A Collection
of NWP Articles. National Writing Project, 13 May 2010. Web. 26 Jan. 2015.
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