The reading/writing connection

I suppose all writers intuitively know that writing and reading and intrinsically connected skills. Even my basic writing students, most of whom would not describe themselves as writers, usually articulate (after a fashion) Janet Emig’s assertion that writing and reading are inextricably connected verbal thinking skills ("Writing as a Mode of Learning" 282-283). However, in early process theory, these connections between reading and writing were not so easily or clearly drawn, and I wonder if today our ready acceptance of those connections doesn’t come more from a place of theoretical contentment than from true understanding of how those languaging processes interact.

Specifically, I question how reading influences writing. Emig touches on the kernel of my issue when she posits that reading and writing cannot accurately be split between the “passive” and the “active”: “The less useful distinction is that between listening and reading as receptive functions and talking and writing as productive functions. Critics of those terms like Louise Rosenblatt rightfully point out that the connotation of passivity too often accompanies the notion of receptivity when reading…is a vital, construing act” (283). I agree with Emig and Rosenblatt, although I’m less convinced than they seem to be that reading is always-already active; I’m equally skeptical that writing is inherently “active,” however, since I have seen many students approach writing with the determination to complete an assignment without learning anything about writing (or content, for that matter) from the exercise. Thus if writing or reading are to qualify as representational or symbolic ways of learning through “restatement in words” (Emig 285), both endeavors must be approached with a reflective self-awareness that one is trying to learn from these activities.

Such a contention, however, doesn’t neatly answer my question of how reading influences writing, because it doesn’t suffice to say that reading can improve writing if one approaches reading with the appropriate mindset. When I put this question to my basic writing students, one writer – I’ll call her “L” – insists that reading expands a writer’s vocabulary, teaches the “rules” of writing (such as paragraphing), and essentially offers styles of writing to imitate. As sophisticated as this answer is, another student, “B,” immediately argues that “good” writing is not imitation; good writing must express the writer’s own ideas through a unique voice. I find myself inclined to agree with both L and B, which leads me back to my original question along a different route: If reading influences writing by showing a writer the ropes, in the same way a novice boxer learns his moves by watching the heavy-weight champion from the sidelines, then why do we consider “good writing” to be a unique combination of those learned skills? How, in other words, does a writer move from emulating what s/he reads to controlling language in such a way that her/his own authorial identity is created?

Linda Flower and John Hayes’ research on Cognitive Process Theory and rhetorical problem-solving moves us closer to this answer. Making the argument, as Emig does, that writing promotes learning, Flower and Hayes assert that “if one studies the process by which a writer uses a goal to generate ideas, then consolidates those ideas and uses them to revise or regenerate new, more complex goals,…one sees why the process of revising and clarifying goals has such a broad effect, since it is through setting these new goals that the fruits of discovery come back to inform the continuing process of writing” (“Cognitive Process Theory” 386). To put it simply, writing, when the writer goes beyond dully plodding through an assignment to find something s/he wants to convey to readers, is an active, meaning-making process. So too, I believe, is reading, when it falls under the category of a “vital, construing act.” Readers who fully engage a text understand that they are not discovering meaning inherent within those words; they are creating meaning out of their own knowledge, experiences, and beliefs, and that in the act of reading, they also have the opportunity to change their knowledge, experiences, and beliefs. Writing offers the same (re)generative power for writers who recognize that “writers don’t find meanings, they make them. A writer in the act of discovery is hard at work searching memory, forming concepts, and forging a new structure of ideas, while at the same time trying to juggle all the constraints imposed by his or her purpose, audience, and language itself” (Flower and Hayes, “Cognition of Discovery” 21).

The answer to my question therefore involves both a reader/writer’s orientation toward reading and writing as meaning-making, learnable and learning-saturated languaging tasks as well as a reader/writer’s willingness to experiment with new ways of thinking, believing, and expressing. My basic writing student “R” perhaps came closest to this mark when, joining the debate L and B sparked, he insisted that reading opens up a whole new world of writers. This world is not simply a world of vocabulary, genre, or correctness; rather, it is, as R described it, a world of ideas that helps a writer find her/his own ideas. In describing writing as a mode of learning and writing as rhetorical problem-solving, early process theorists like Emig, Flower and Hayes showed us the outlines of how reading and writing “work” in individual minds. As writing teachers and researchers drawing upon their theories, however, we can’t assume that the mystery (to use a Peter Elbow metaphor) of how reading and writing interact has been solved. We need to put this question to our students, to ask it of ourselves, and to find, as the early process theorists did, ways to see these processes at work in the minds of reader/writers.