THE JOURNAL OF THE ARKANSAS READING ASSOCIATION
Reader THE
Leading the Way in Literacy Volume 39 • Issue 1
An Affiliate of the International Reading Association
Spring 2015
Deep Reading: Linking Reading and Writing Processes The following is an excerpt from Chapter One of Ruth Culham’s latest professional development books entitled The Writing Thief. Printed with permission.
Culham will be a featured speaker at the 2015 Literacy Conference. By Ruth Culham “Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out,” according to Pam Allyn (2013, para. 5), a noted educational writer and researcher. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two that benefits both. When you write, you read back what you’ve said to see if the meaning is clear, if it makes sense. You check off each of the traits in your mind - ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions to make sure the text communicates your intent and is as well crafted as possible. This is deep reading - close reading in its purest form. It involves more than reading for general content; it means reading with the intent of discovering places that need further revision and editing so the final piece is crystal clear. Deep reading also means slowing down to notice what the writer of a text that’s not your own has done and why. This is when readers discover the techniques of the writer exhibited on the page.
“Reading is a process of constructing meaning from the complex, naturally redundant network of syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic information that comprises written language,” explains Bridges (2013, para. 7), a researcher and editor. Deep reading requires thinking about how the written language works. Defined in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems (Coulmas, 1999), writing is the process of applying a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way, with the purpose of recording messages which can be retrieved by everyone who knows the language in question and the rules by virtue of which its units are encoded in the writing system (p. 560).
The retrieval, of course, is reading. In this respect, reading and writing are a one-two punch. When we work on the skills related to one, we quite naturally work on the other. I believe that one of our foremost tasks as writing teachers is to make the relationship transparent for students so they can see the influence that reading has on their writing and not leave it up to chance or happy accident that a technique or idea from writing might show up in their own work. Deep reading as a writer is something students need help to understand. When I interviewed fourth-grade students in Blue Springs, Missouri, on this topic, one student came to a different way of looking at reading by zeroing in on one of the traits, organization:
Me: Devon, would you talk about how you learn about writing by what you are reading? Devon: I don’t know what you mean. Me: Do you ever read something that you really like and wind up trying to do something like it in your writing? Devon: Oh. So, like when Mrs. Gaines just read The One and Only Ivan (I really liked that book), I could write a story about a gorilla or a zoo or something? Me: Sorta. I was thinking more about how the book was written, not just what it was about. Did Katherine Applegate do anything interesting in her writing that helped you relate to the idea? Devon: [pause] Hmm...I don’t know. Me: Let’s get a copy of the book and see if you can find something in it that really worked for you as a reader. Then, let’s look at it like writers and see what she did to make you feel that way. (continued on page 7) Devon: OK.