Week 9: Article Reviews

The purpose of the Bunn article is to get the reader to Read Like a Writer (RLW).  In this article, Bunn begins with an interesting anecdote of how he used to read by flashlight while working at the Palace Theater.  As he continued to read, he began to realize that as readers, we should begin to read critically in order to discover ‘why’ the author made the writing choices that were made.  In other words, all writers make choices as they write, so readers should imagine the reasoning why said writing decisions were made. One good example that he gave is that if a writer was to write to architects on what Corinthian columns are, we would write differently than if we were writing to carpenters.  With architects, the writer may want to look at the history of the style, but with carpenters, more specifics such as the dimension of the columns would be important.

Throughout the article, Bunn laid out many different questions that we could ask about our reading, such as…What is the author’s purpose for writing?...Who is the intended audience?...Why did the author use this genre of writing?…Was the style of writing effective?  The questions can go on forever, but the RLW process helps the reader to essentially become better writers.

The Bunn article is very relevant in my experience.  Due to cultural differences (coming from a Southern, African-American family), I had a very difficult time writing in school.  As a young adult, my teachers would often become frustrated because I wanted to write like we talked at home.  After some frustration, I realized that if I wanted to write better, then I had to start reading and listening to more formal language.  This led to me reading the newspaper critically (looking for reasons why grammatical choices were made), and listening to the news. I surmised that since the newspaper writers and reporters HAD to be grammatically correct, I should model my writing after them.  While I am in no way perfect at the task, I must state that mimicking the media has helped me greatly as a reader.  

The second article, by John Bean, gives strategies that teachers can use to help students read better. He notes that students need to become more focused readers who look carefully at the subject.   Good readers form visual images of the setting, make predictions, and constantly ask questions about what they are reading.  Some of the techniques that Bean mentioned to help students included teaching them to re-read difficult material, adjust their reading strategies depending upon the difficulty of the text, look for structure in the material (how the writer sectioned the ideas), learn cultural codes, and pay attention to grammar.  In addition, Bean mentioned that teachers should make the students more responsible for the readings and avoid quizzes. Teachers can also empower students to take notes, use the dictionary, and ask detailed questions regarding the reading.

This article was very interesting and it listed numerous strategies that I could use to help my students better understand the material.  While I feel that I can write forever on the topic, I will just choose one thing that I can do in the future.  In the fall semester, I will be teaching accelerated classes for the first time.  In my regular classes, I find that student sometimes struggle with understanding the concepts.  This is partially because they have not read the chapter prior to class.  They have learned how to search the book for answers to the quizzes, but when given a hands-on task (of the same material), they often flop.  One thing that I can do is to make the students read the chapter BEFORE coming to class.  I think that I could use probing questions to ensure that they understood the concepts, as opposed to just lecturing about the material.  Graphic organizers may also help the students to better grasp the concepts.  Overall, both of the articles were very good reads and were filled with helpful, practical strategies for teachers of writing.