Teaching – Page 9 – College Ready Writing 1.0

It’s All in How You Say it: Thinking About Tone

Today, I talked to my developmental students about making sure that the “tone” of their essays is appropriate. We’ve already talked how they can look like we’re wearing sweatpants to a job interview when they don’t adapt their writing according to purpose and audience, but the students needed reminding, especially since this was their first “formal” essay (the first essay was a narrative). I’ve read drafts and, while their writing has dramatically improved, they are still writing like they talk.

I talked to them about not using contractions, avoiding using slang or txt language, not swearing. I mention that they really don’t need to use the first person when they write essay most of the time; what sounds stronger: “I think this is true” or “This is true and here’s why?” Not to mention that it’s redundant for them to say “the book that I read”; if it’s not in quotation marks, properly referenced, I assume that you have thought it, read it, observed it, etc. It’s your name at the top of the paper, isn’t it?

I warn against trying to hard to sound “formal” in their writing by using big words, complex sentence structures, or trying to give their essay an over-inflated sense of importance/significance. The worst mistake a student can make it to use a word incorrectly, write sentences that don’t make any sense structurally, or make ridiculous statements (real example: “For over 100 years, women have been battling with how they are portrayed on television). Simple, I tell my students, does not equal simplistic. Clarity is their best friend.

Finally, I talk to my students about eliminating what I call “punctuation words”; those words that we use when we speak that act like punctuation. Starting sentences with “So,” “So then,” “Well,” “You know,” or “I mean.” Using “like” or “um” or “uh” as commas (don’t laugh, I’ve seen it in papers). Or ending sentences with “right?”or, once again, “you know?” This is particularly revealing to the students, and the discussion always makes me incredibly uncomfortable because I am now hyperaware of how I use all of these formulations when I lecture. I mean, who of us doesn’t, right?

I try to wait until my developmental students have a good chunk of their papers written before hitting them with this lesson (and requirement to revise). This way, students are not frozen early in the process, focusing more on tone than they are on content. It’s rewarding to watch students scrambling through the drafts of their essays as we talk, crossing out words and trying to reformulate sentences as we talk about these issues. It also helps them to see how easy it is to fix later, as well as how big of a difference just ten minutes of relatively minor editing can make.

I wonder a lot about how good we are as academics at adapting our tone. Or how accepting academia is at our attempts at changes in tone. I’ve written about my own process of adapting my tone and style (scroll down about halfway) and how higher education often frowns upon anything non-academic. People are quick to blame academics, especially in the humanities, for writing in a style that is essentially incomprehensible to a general reader, and thus adding to our increased marginalization (see the recent cuts in language departments and humanities funding in the U.K. as examples). Our audience, as academics, is primarily other academics. Not necessarily because we want it to be, at least not exclusively, but because it has to be in order to get tenure. As academics, we learn quickly what tone we are expected to maintain in our writing. Why are conferences so bad? Because we don’t adapt our writing for a spoken presentation. Why bother? The line still appears on your C.V., and it’s easier to polish it up for publication, which is what really matters.

If we have our own challenges in adapting our writing, why are we trusted with helping students do the same?

Blasts from the Past

As I gather a stronger following, I want to share with readers some of the posts I am most proud of from the “early” days of my blog (before I was posting at University of Venus, before Blogger began keeping stats for me).

“If Not the University, Where?” A very early post where I am still trying to figure out where I belong, if not teaching at a university. There has been much talk (most recently a hysterical video) about how students shouldn’t even bother getting a PhD in English/Humanities. I may have chosen my path naively, but looking back, even on the worst days, I can’t imagine doing anything else.

“A Women’s Work in Higher Ed” and “Higher Ed’s Missing Women” Where I examine the effects of an entire generation of women who are off the tenure-track and thus excluded from the ranks of leaders in higher education, essentially silencing their voices in the quest to shape the university in the 21st Century.

“Loyalty or Desperation?” When we are off the tenure-track, at what point does our loyalty to an institution become a form of desperation? One of my first University of Venus posts.

“Who Will be our Future Teachers?” With the continued vilification of teachers in the media and much of the education reform debate (most recently with New York publishing the value-added scores of teachers), I wonder who is going to become the next generation(s) of K-12 teachers? I think one can start asking, too, who will be our future university professors, as well.

“The Resilency of Trees” Possibly the post I am most proud of, if only because the image has stuck with me throughout the past eight months. For any of us who are going out on a limb for what we believe in, this is for you.

Thanks everyone for your support, your feedback, and thanks for reading.

The Truth About Grading

I finally handed back all of the papers I had today. Last week, it was my developmental writers. This week, it’s my more advanced 200-level writers. They’re all decent writers, so grading becomes less about correcting grammar and more about how they fulfill the requirements of the specific essay assignment. This is much more art than science.

The students had to chose a piece of rhetoric (speech, op-ed, or advertisement) and break down the rhetorical “tricks” the author/speaker/creator used. They were limited to using the six essays we had discussed in class about rhetoric. I had approved their selected piece, seen an outline, and given feedback on their introductions. We had done a number of peer review and self-assessment exercises in class. The peer review questions addressed the exact questions I would be asking when grading, as well as the self-assessment exercise. I felt confident that if the students attended class and took the exercises seriously, they would produce decent essays.

I was partially right. I neglected to include an assignment checklist, which I give to my developmental writers, wrongly assuming that the 200-level students didn’t need one. Essays are like a house of cards; take away one of the fundamental pieces, and the whole thing collapses. But how badly did it collapse? Was the roof missing or was it just a mess of cards? And what corresponding grade accompanies each unique deficiency?

Take the following example: I have one student whom I particularly get along with. We both lived in Southern California, and he’s tracked me down after class to talk about living in a place so completely different from the one where we currently find ourselves. He comes to class, does all the work, and does it well. He chose a particularly challenging piece of visual rhetoric: an illustration used pre-American Revolution that was intended to garner support for taking up arms against the British. We talked about how it would be a challenging, but possibly rewarding project.

The end result was well-written and thorough, but poorly organized and neglected to refer to any of the rhetorical tricks we had discussed and they were required to use. So what grade does that earn? Complicating matter is that I like the kid and I know that he has worked hard on the paper. If I give him a C, am I being too harsh, but if I don’t, am I being too generous? It’s hard to compare the papers because each paper did different things well and poorly. If I didn’t know who this student was, what grade would I give the paper?

I don’t know. I can never know, really. Built into my writing classes are lots of opportunities for feedback directly from me, meaning that submitting papers anonymously is practically impossible. Getting to know my students is my way of a) remembering who they are and b) knowing how best to give them feedback. I might not have the time or freedom to personalize how I deliver the courses I teach, but I do have complete power over how and what I say to my students to help them become better writers. The only way that works is if I get to know them as much as I get to know their writing.

You could argue that I took the easy way out of the problem; I decided that each student would have an opportunity to revise and resubmit their essays for a new grade. I knew that the aforementioned student would be troubled by the grade that I gave him (he was) and would come to talk to me (he did) with the aim of rewriting and improving what he had done. I knew that all of the students who had worked hard but produced flawed papers would come and see me in order to be able to resubmit their revised papers. I also knew that a poor grade would serve as a wake-up call for the students who weren’t taking me seriously yet.

Grading is, indeed, an art, but one I take very seriously. The feedback I give to justify that grade is as much an art and no less important. If getting to know my students makes the former job more difficult, so be it. The latter is more meaningful in the long run.

Working Smarter, Not Harder (Take 2)

You can find the first version of the post here.

Why a second draft? You can read about that here.

Growing up, I wasn’t good at a lot of things; I was hopeless with a ball, or worse, a stick and a ball, completely useless as a runner, climber, or any sort of movement on land. But put me in the water, and I was a fish or a dolphin, a clear natural. My mom put me in swimming lessons before I could even walk, and, since then, I had always been told, because swimming seemed to come easily to me, that I was destined for great things.

When I was fourteen, however, I hit a wall; my times stopped improving and even started to get slower. I tried to push myself in training, swimming until my lungs burned and my muscles failed. I was in the pool at 5:30 AM every day for two hours, back again in the evenings for three more. And yet, at the end of every race, I would look up and see a time that was stagnant.

I continued swimming competitively until I was nineteen. Five years is a long time to kill yourself in the water for little gain. I couldn’t understand why my times weren’t improving. Was it because I had hit puberty and my body was no longer “built” for swimming? This was a time before Dara Torres, and female swimmers were believed to peak at fourteen or fifteen. Most girls quit, but I stubbornly stuck with it. Perhaps “greatness” was no longer in the cards, but I was going to get a best time, even if it killed me. Day in and day out, I lifted weights and worked out in the pool. It didn’t kill me, but it did kill my knees and shoulders. Although I had planned to swim in college, after one semester, my body and spirit had had enough. It was too hard to balance the demands of college and swimming. I quit and focused instead on my education.

Looking back now, I may have worked hard in the pool, but I didn’t take very good care of myself outside of the pool. My eating habits were atrocious, and my sleeping habits weren’t very much better. I would kill myself in the pool and leave my body little to no support in the recovery. It was no coincidence that not only did I hit puberty at fourteen, but my parents also got divorced. Everyday, I swam distracted; swimming was easy and an escape for me, so my mind was never really focused at the task at hand. It wasn’t until I began training as a Master’s swimmer that I realized how important that focus is.

Five years and twenty pounds later, I began to train again. I was in the middled of my PhD, teaching college students, and well on my way to fulfilling my goal of becoming a university professor. Something was still missing, however. I missed the water, the camaraderie, and the physical challenge that swimming provided. I joined a Master’s swim team. We only trained an hour a day, five days a week. Many weeks, I couldn’t even make all five practices. It felt so good to be in the water again. My shoulders weren’t an issue anymore. And while my lungs still burned and my muscles just about failed at the end of a workout, I could finally see the effort paying off. Despite my extra weight and age, on top of the severely reduced training time, at the end of the year, my times were almost as fast as they were when I had left competitive swimming.

My coaches preached swimming and training smarter, not harder. We had a limited amount of time to train, so every moment had to be as close to excellence as possible. Every stroke, every turn, every push off the wall should be nearly perfect. This took an incredible amount of mental discipline, someting I didn’t have when I was swimming as a teen. It was doubly important for me because if I let up my concentration on my stroke, my shoulders would start to complain loudly. I started to understand how just simply mindlessly going through the motions, no matter how much effort I had put into those motions, had lead me to peak at such an early age.

Now that I am university instructor, when I teach writing, I try to get my students to understand that effort is important, but they need to work hard at doing the right things and doing things right. It doesn’t necessarily make the work any easier, but it does make the work more meaningful and rewarding.

Practicing What I Preach

In my developmental writing class, the students just turned in their narrative essay assignment. The topic was to describe an event in their lives that shaped their attitude towards school or education. Initially, I asked them to write on the topic as a “free write” during the first ten minutes of class. When I handed it back to them, I congratulated them on having written a first draft of their essay.

We read other narrative essays, talked about pacing and organization, making sure your story has a point, as well as including vivid details, or showing instead of telling. We did outlines, different peer review exercises, as well as turning it into a more familiar looking grammar exercise (pressing enter at the end of every sentence). The assignment was only 750 words long, which most students cleared without problem. I saw students beginning to gain confidence in their own ideas and their own writing.

And then came time to grade them. It was frustrating for me to go through the papers that I knew the student had worked so hard on but still came up short. How do I give feedback on these papers while making sure that the students didn’t get discouraged or give out, without it sounding like empty encouragement? It inspired me to write my latest blog post on working smarter, not harder, but it also gave me an idea on how to let the kids know that all writing can be improved, as well as putting into practice (again) their critical reading skills.

I printed out copies of my blog post and after I had handed back the students their essays, I passed them out and told the students to have at my writing. They read the essays by themselves, but paired off to talk about how I could improve the essay. They spent almost 30 minutes tearing my writing a new one. I was filled with incredible pride when my words were coming back to me, directed at my own work; they had really got it.

My conclusion was too abrupt. I was missing important pieces of information (who was Dara Torres? When did you decide to be a teacher? When did you start swimming? What does swimming smarter even mean?), as well as jumping to far forward in time (you told me that I couldn’t do that!). I had sentence fragments, muddled syntax (although they didn’t call it that), and missing words. They looked at the story as a whole, as well as the individual word choices (you use the same word a lot) and grammar issues.

The students seemed to really enjoy it. It helped that I sat there with a smile on my face the entire time. All it took was for that first student to speak up and offer their (tentative) advice and for me to acknowledge and accept it. I tried to show them that all writing can be improved and that feedback isn’t personal, it’s made in order to make your writing better. The message, found in the post itself, is that we all need to find a way to channel our effort in order to get the best results.

Writing has always come easy for me, but it can always be better. For my students, here is the end result of their hard work on my writing.

Lessons in Working Smarter, not Harder

Growing up, I wasn’t good at a lot of things; I was hopeless with a ball, or worse, a stick and a ball, completely useless as a runner, climber, or any sort of movement on land. But put me in the water, and I was a fish. A dolphin. A natural. I had always been told that I was destined for great things as a swimmer. When I was fourteen, however, I hit a wall; my times stopped improving and even started to get slower. I tried to push myself in training, swimming until my lungs burned and my muscles failed. I was in the pool at 5:30 AM every day for two hours, back again in the evenings for three more. And yet, at the end of every race, I would look up and see a time that was stagnant.

I continued swimming competitively until I was nineteen. Five years is a long time to kill yourself in the water for little gain. I couldn’t understand why my times weren’t improving. Was it because I had hit puberty and my body was no longer “built” for swimming? This was a time before Dara Torres, and female swimmers were believed to peak at fourteen or fifteen. Most girls quit. But I stubbornly stuck with it. Perhaps “greatness” was not longer in the cards, but I was going to get a best time, even if it killed me. Day in and day out, I lifted weights and worked out in the pool. It didn’t kill me, but it did kill my knees and shoulders. Although I had planned to swim in college, after one semester, my body and spirit had had enough. I quit.

Looking back, I may have worked hard in the pool, but I didn’t take very good care of myself outside of the pool. My eating habits were atrocious, and my sleeping habits weren’t very much better. I would kill myself in the pool and leave my body little to no support in the recovery. It was also no coincidence that not only did puberty hit at fourteen, but my parents’ divorce as well. Everyday, I swam distracted; swimming was easy and an escape for me, so my mind was never really focused at the task at hand. It wasn’t until I began training as a Master’s swimmer that I realized how important that focus is.

Five years and twenty pounds later, I began to train again. I missed the water, the camaraderie, and the physical challenge. I joined a Master’s swim team. We only trained an hour a day, five days a week. Many weeks, I couldn’t even make all five practices. It felt so good to be in the water again. My shoulders weren’t an issue anymore. And while my lungs still burned and my muscles just about failed at the end of a workout, I could finally see the effort paying off. Despite my extra weight and age, on top of the severely reduced training time, at the end of the year, my times were almost as fast as they were when I had left competitive swimming.

When I teach writing, I try to get my students to understand that effort is important, but they need to work hard at doing the right things and doing things right. It doesn’t necessarily make the work any easier, but it does make the work more meaningful and rewarding.

Teaching as Coaching

When I was young, my dream was to become a lifeguard. I also wanted to be in a rock band and be a marine biologist, but lifeguarding was a real, tangible goal with a clear path that could be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. Also, I didn’t know any rock stars or marine biologists personally, but I was in awe of the lifeguards who coached and taught me every summer. That dream came true; at 16, I was lifeguarding, coaching swim team and water polo, and teaching swimming lessons. I did that for four summers, as well as coaching beginner swimmers part-time over the winters. I loved every minute of it. Over the years, even as I turned away from swimming as a full-time occupation/obsession, I always seemed to come back to coaching.

I see a lot of similarities between what I used to do as a coach and what I now do as a writing instructor. I’ve written before about how writing is a lot like sports in that you need to practice the basics, but I see my role as a coach rather than how we traditionally understand the role of a teacher.

With beginner swimmers, who were always my favorite to coach, you spend a lot of time building skills through short instruction followed by putting it into immediate practice. Especially with my developmental writers, they need to immediately put into practice, and in as many ways as possible, the skills or concepts they are learning. As a coach, it was easy to show swimmers how the drills we were relentlessly practicing fit into when they swam regularly. My students grumble, but understand that the grammar drills or writing exercises they are forced to do reinforce the lessons they need to know when they write a paper.

When you coach, much of the hard work (for you) takes place before and after practice. You plan the season, develop your long-term work-out strategy, write out individual practices, and modify those plans as the season progresses while observing how the athletes are doing within the program. During practice, you implement the plan, paying close attention to what is happening, adding feedback when necessary. Especially for a sport like swimming, the coach doesn’t seem to be doing much while you are killing yourself in the water.

In many ways, teaching often looks the same. You teach a brief lesson, based on the larger goals and aims of the class that you prepared in advance, and then let the students practice or work on their own/in small groups. You get their work at the end of the class, bringing it with you outside of class to evaluate it. Sometimes, this leads you to modify your next lesson. You are always listening and watching as they work in class, offering feedback, encouragement, or direction as needed. But students often don’t see all of the work you do as a teacher outside of class, or even the very subtle work you are doing in class while they kill themselves doing whatever assignment you have given them.

In sports, the athlete knows that there will be a game day or competition where the hard work will pay off. Often, students don’t connect the work they are doing in class with their own game day: the test(s) or essay(s) they will inevitable have to write. I struggle all the time as a teacher in a way that I never did as a coach: how to make my students understand the big picture that informs and drives everything they do in the classroom. My swimmers understood that there was a swim meet, a goal time, a cut or place that they were aiming to achieve. Swimming is an easy sport to drift off and fall into autopilot, but they always knew when the next competition was taking place, leading to a focus on the task at hand. My students complain about the work, forgetting that there will be a test or an essay, and what we are doing in class will be important when “game time” comes around.

But I think one of the most important lessons I’ve taken from coaching into teaching is that I can’t do the work for my students. There were always a few swimmers in the pool who would go through the motions without much thought or effort. They didn’t take care of themselves outside of the pool, and that reflected in their performance. They were swimming out of habit, I guess, or because their friends were all on the team, too. I’ve always coached on teams that if you showed up to practice, you’d get to swim. But those swimmers’ times would never improve, or would get slower. You can yell, cajole, remind, nag, bribe, and every and any other motivational technique, but at the end of the day, only the individual swimmer can decide if they are going to do the work, take it seriously, and see the results.

My students are the same. They come to class, but they’re not really present. They do the work, but put little effort in it. School in general, or perhaps my course in particular, falls low on the list of their priorities. A good teacher finds a way to inspire everyone, I know, but sometimes, that bad grade, the explanation of how the class will benefit them in college and beyond, the engaging and relevant exercises you’ve painstakingly developed do nothing to shake certain students out of their complacency. I can’t write their papers for them. I can just be there for them when they are ready to do better.

Michael Vick is an interesting study in this phenomenon. He has recently come out and said that when he was the starting quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, he was lazy and only did the minimum because it was “good enough.” In an interview with his old coach, he admitted that he didn’t try and lied, not to mention distracted; football wasn’t his first priority. But now, after a stint in jail, he’s become a student of the game, becoming a more effective quarterback at an age where many are beginning a steep decline. The coaches indeed have made a difference, but so too has the individual’s situation and dedication to the task at hand.

In sport and in school, you have to be willing to do the work and do the work to the best of your abilities. In sports and in school, I’m here to help.

Academic Independence

Student: “Aren’t you going to correct it for me?”

Me: “No, you’re going to do it.”

Student: (Disgusted sigh)

There was an article last week on HuffPost College by admissions consultant advising parents on how they can back away from their High School Junior and Senior aged kids in the name of independence and self-sufficiency. And then results of a new survey comes out claiming that parents are hovering around their college attending children more than ever. And while I fall to the side of letting kids go and making their own way and their own mistakes, I don’t think that students are adequately prepared to succeed academically on their own.

What do I mean by this? As I stated in my previous column on how most admissions standards encourages a narrow focus on only certain kinds of writing, students have no idea how to adapt their writing depending on the circumstances and demands of their assignments. More troubling, perhaps, is a general inability of students to look at their own writing and work to improve it.

We are currently doing peer-review and self-assessments in my writing classes. The exercises are guided, using questions and directions that exactly mirror my own process when evaluating their work. My goal is to get them to be more critical and aware readers of their own writing, partially through looking at the work of others, partially through repeatedly revising their own writing.

With my developmental writing class, we are working on a short narrative essay, which makes it easier for me to work with them and offer my own feedback along with the feedback of their peers. Plus, this is a developmental writing course – they need more help, or else they wouldn’t have been placed in the course to begin with. In my larger 200-level class, we are writing a longer essay. When I revealed to the students that I would not be giving them any feedback on their drafts, I faced an open revolt. How did I expect them to do well on the essay when they didn’t know what I would be grading them on?

First question, how do you write your papers in other classes where there is no peer-review or drafting process? Second question, how do you ever expect to be able to do this on your own if you don’t start somewhere? If you don’t know how to properly cite sources, what good does it do for me to simply correct your mistakes for you? If you don’t know the rules for proper comma use (which I have to now check and double-check myself), what good does it do for me to just mark it on your paper?

My goal is always to teach my students skills and how to adapt them to different situation. In other words, academic independence. Or, more appropriately, intellectual independence. Parents can’t do their school work for them; then again, neither can I.

In Defense of the Narrative Essay

I’ll admit it; I was a narrative essay hater. What was the point, I lamented. The last thing students needed to do was to do more writing about themselves. They needed to learn how to do proper research, organize their well-thought out ideas in a coherent way, and draw reasonable and meaningful conclusions. What does writing about themselves have to do with that?

Now, I see the narrative essay for what it is: a valuable bridge between where my students are and where they need to be. Especially with my remedial students, they need to practice writing in a more organized, thoughtful, and coherent essay without worrying about doing research. They tend to see essays as being too prescriptive, too limiting, while a story offers them the opportunity to be creative. They get to be more creative, and I get them to follow some guidelines that bridge into “real” essay writing.

Here are some of the other advantages of the narrative essay:

1) Brevity. Typically, a story can go on and on and on and on. The narrative essay can easily be limited to 500 to 750 words, and the whole idea of making sure your story has a point or message is powerful tool to get them to reign in their tangents, asides, and repetition. Keep it short and simple, stick to what matters, and make your point.

2) Breaking “Bad” Habits. I have voiced my displeasure at the reliance on the five-paragraph essay, so relentlessly taught all through junior high and high school. You can’t tell a good story, with a clear purpose or not, in the form of a five-paragraph essay. Students have to come up with new ways to introduce their ideas, new ways to progress and build on those ideas, and new ways to conclude without relying on repeating their thesis statement.

3) Show, don’t tell. You may tell a story, but the best stories paint a picture with words. Students, because of the requirements of a good narrative, can’t simply “tell” the readers what the point of the story is. They have to find a way to create characters and setting that come alive, while communicating their point.

4) Confidence. Every student has a story (heck, many stories) that they want to tell. On twitter today, someone I’m following wrote: “People who plagiarize weren’t told enough when they were younger, “Your ideas and writing are great!!!” Hence, they steal.” I had never thought of it that way. Most of my remedial students have been told that they aren’t good writers, not to mention that they aren’t the smartest, either. Part of the challenge is just getting the kids to feel confident about their writing and ideas. They know their stories and we can work together to tell it well.

5) Adaptability. I tell my students that they will probably never write another narrative essay in university. But being able to adapt their writing and ideas for different audiences? That’s a skill that will serve them well long after they’ve graduated. A narrative essay is really wonderful because it more naturally has an audience beyond just the teacher. Students need to think about who they are and will be writing for outside of their professors.

Once they’ve built up their confidence, seen the value of having some rules or guidelines that they need to follow, and begun to think beyond the five-paragraph essay, my students are more willing and more able to learn about and write more traditional college essays. I’m glad somewhere along the way I was “forced” to teach the narrative essay. My students are the ultimate benefactors.

Sweatpants to a Job Interview

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I think it bears repeating when trying to explain to students why adapting their writing habits for college or school work is necessary. In the same way you wouldn’t wear sweatpants to a job interview (and, for whatever reason, all the students seem to agree that there is no job where this would be appropriate), nor do you write for your classes the same way as you would write to your friends. Nor do you write the same way for all your classes; each discipline has different conventions that need to follow. This, I tell my students, is why you need to know your rules for using a comma or semi-colon correctly, or how to format your paper following MLA guidelines; each time you make a mistake, it’s like wearing sweatpants to a job interview.

But what about a student’s reading habits? Most of my students claim to enjoy reading; at least, they enjoy reading what they enjoy reading. As many of them put so eloquently, anything else puts them to sleep. So I ask them, how do you read when you’re reading what you enjoy? Do you see reading as a form of escape, where you can lose yourself in the words? Are you looking to escape when you read, or perhaps you’re transported to another time? When you do this, you are passively reading, allowing yourself to be taken wherever the authors intends to. You are also engaging primarily on an emotional level, and you’re brain gets to take a holiday.

There’s nothing wrong with reading this way. But, how has it worked when you’ve read materials that don’t “take you away” or engage your primarily on an emotional level? In other words, how well has it worked to read this way when you’re reading for school? Because, let’s face it, most of what you are assigned to read for school is not written for your heart, but written for your brain. In the same way a student needs to adapt their writing for a variety of circumstances, so too must a student adapt their reading strategies depending on the purpose and materials. Reading an academic essay or textbook the same way as you would a novel is, once again, like wearing sweatpants to a job interview.

There are lots of strategies that you can engage with a text as an active reader (note-taking, pre-reading, writing responses, glossaries, etc), but I like to tell students that they need to see their reading for school as more of a conversation. Question and ask questions of the author, even if he or she isn’t there to answer. Argue back with the author. Study the way the author is making their argument. If it makes you feel stupid, investigate why that is happening and work to remedy it. Stay awake, stay alert, and keep working to understand, even if all you end up with is an endless list of questions. And, above all, re-read again and again. The words on the page won’t change, but you will. And each time you read something, it’ll be a different conversation.

And if this makes it harder to read passively, even for fun, then so be it. Just don’t tell them that.