From Writing Spaces, a great (and free!) collection of essays for use in the college writing classroom. Fun fact: I made the final edits to this piece the day I gave birth to my daughter Lila. I still remember my arms stretching awkwardly over my belly to reach the keyboard.
The abstract:
As a writing instructor, you want to help students reflect on and refine reading practices that are so crucial to writing and academic success. An examination of the elements of a rhetorical reading strategy—conceptualizing reading as part of an academic conversation, reading actively (and what this looks like), figuring out primary and secondary audiences, recognizing road maps embedded in the reading, and identifying the main argument and why it matters—make this chapter a powerful tool for starting classroom discussion and/or inspiring written reflection. This chapter can also help your students learn to recognize and avoid employing reading strategies that don’t work: reading without grasping content, skimming or skipping text, or latching onto one minor argument without understanding the author’s main point, or following every unfamiliar term, name, and phrase back to multiple sources.
The full piece is here.
write & learn 