Salvatori, Mariolina. “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition” College English 58:4: 4401-454. Web.

1. Summary

In this article, Mariolina Salvatori addresses the tendency of introductory college composition courses to minimize traditional literary readings and to focus on writing practices, and posits several alternative reading practices that she believes can do specific service to the development of writing habits. She begins by acknowledging that the displacement of reading practices from composition courses is in response to a legitimate criticism of the traditional ways that reading has been taught in the university, citing William E Coles’ indictment of traditional university reading practices in Teaching Composing: A Guide to Teaching Writing as a Self-Creating Process. However, Salvatori argues that a different model of reading—reading which is done self-reflexively and with particular attention to the factors which make up the process of reading, rather than the text of reading—engages in the same acts of deconstruction, argumentation, and communication that writing does. She finishes by acknowledging the counter-arguments to her position and by defending that position by concluding that the self-absorption of this kind of reading actually serves a conscientious development of students’ critical capacities.

2. Quotations

“…a corollary to the reader’s responsibility is the writer’s responsibility, the responsibility of writing a text that asks (rather than answers) questions, that proposes (rather than imposes) arguments, and that therefore makes a conversation possible.” (441)

“…that ‘the question reading in the teaching of composition’ is not merely the question of whether reading should or should not be used in the composition classroom. The issue is what kind of reading gets to be theorized and practiced.” (443)

“Such theories make it possible to claim not only that reading can be taught, but also that it can be taught as an opportunity to investigate knowledge-producing practices. Rather than divining a text’s meaning or making a text subservient to preestablished significations, such theories construct reading as an activity by means of which readers can engage texts responsibly and critically. Responsibly, that is, in ways that as far as possible make those texts speak, rather than speak for them or make them speak through other texts. And critically—in ways that is, that demand that readers articulate a reflexive critique both of the argument they attribute to those texts and of the argument they compose as they compose as they respond to those texts.” (444)

“Expert readers and writers have developed a kind of introspective reading that allows them to decide–as they read and as they write–when to pursue, when to revise, when to abandon a line of argument, and when to start afresh. They have devised a method of reading that, in Coleridge’s words, functions as ‘a way or path to transit’ that allows their minds ‘to classify’ and ‘to appropriate’ the events, the images, the thoughts they think as they read. Part of the challenge confronting us as teachers is to learn how to make it possible–within the time and institutional constraints that bind us–for students to learn to perform this kind of introspective reading.” (446)

“Let me suggest that teaching reading and writing as interconnected activities, teaching students how to perform critically, and self-reflexively, those recuperative acts by means of which they can conjecture an argument and can establish a responsible critical dialogue with it, as well with the text they compose in response to it, might be an approach appropriate to developing the critical mind-an approach that might mark the difference between students’ participating in their own education and their being passively led through it.” (452)

3. Responses

My immediate reaction to the article is to be impressed that Salvatori managed to both reinforce my belief that good reading practices can be a cornerstone of good writing practices, while also reinventing my notion of “good reading practice.” All quarter, I’ve been toying with ideas about how to integrate Northrop Frye’s A Defense of Reading, in which he discusses how to engage meaningfully (by writing) in the act of reading. While my intentions for introducing this piece to the curriculum were, first and foremost, to push students to 1) understand the value of marking their texts and 2) to highlight a space—the point of contact between the reading and their own pen—in which their reading and writing practices meet, Salvatori introduced another and perhaps more poignant application of the text: to examine with students what seems relevant or irrelevant about a text, why they believe that is so, and how their answers to those questions constitute an argument that is tantamount to writing.

Rather than teaching reading as simply a way to engage in identifying the rhetorical situation of a text and applying that to their own writing, reading can be used to highlight the internal process of analysis, the act of reflection, and even the biases that the process of reading has in common with the process of writing. The specifics of the reading and writing process can be hard to delineate and to teach, but by using them in tandem she posits (and I agree) that we can understand both better. As she says, “Although the processes that constitute our reading and writing are essentially invisible, those processes are, in principle, accessible to analysis, scrutiny, and reflection” (445).

In many ways, Salvatori has encapsulated here a struggle I have been experiencing through my attempt to reconcile the benefits of reading in my own undergraduate experience with the markedly little reading we assign as part of 101. Though I’ve been frustrated by it, I have also been at a loss for the right words to articulate my conviction that reading should have a place in writing curriculum because the curriculum is so deliberately—and effectively—attentive to writing practice. It seems to function perfectly well without a lot of reading—which, because of my own positive academic experiences engaging in the relationship between reading and writing, seems like it should be impossible.

Salvatori says, “I try to teach readers to become conscious of their mental moves to see what such moves produce, and to learn to revise or to complicate those moves as the return to them in light of their newly constructed awareness of what those moves did or did not make possible.” Although she says she tries “to teach readers” here, the same practices of coaching students through their “mental moves” is just as relevant and applicable to some of the same goals we as composition instructors aim to teach our students as writers. This is at the crux of Salvatori’s essay: that reading, like writing, should be a process of engaging meaningfully in an ongoing argument between knowledgeable members of a discourse. Any reading of a text, being filtered through the reader, is only understood by the reader as their own argument for the text’s meaning (which, particularly in a post-structuralist academic world, is always up for interpretive debate).

I also found it rather convicting for her to call out the distinctive difference between traditional models of reading and self-reflexive models. I’ve realized that—while there could certainly be value to using the Frye piece as part of my curriculum in the future—much of my desire to “teach reading” comes from a deep-seated reverence for literature, rather than from engaging students in an applied usage of reading practices in critical thinking and writing practices. She acknowledges that the traditional models of reading—i.e. upholding literature as an ideal to be analyzed and emulated—may not be particularly useful, but that modes of reading which emphasize the act of reading as a process of knowledge-formation (as, she suggests, is the writing process) should be explored and implemented in composition courses.

Salvatori describes a couple of specific models she uses to engage students in reading like writers. I’m really interested in researching the different approaches to using reading in the composition classroom and building up a repertoire of reading-based writing activities. Depending on what our group decides for our presentation, I think it could be really rewarding to pursue a presentation that engages our 513 class in a few different kinds of activities that model various perspectives of how to use reading in composition (i.e. Elbow’s vs. Bartholomae’s perspectives, or—in this article—Salvatori’s vs. Coles’), and then to possibly tease out the pros and cons of each within our specific WWU composition curriculum. However, if our group presentation goes a different direction, I am extremely interested in doing my pedagogical research design around reading research—possibly trying to observe the impact different reading models have on students’ outlook towards writing and their finished written products. As I mentioned, I’ve been interested from the outset in how to integrate more reading in my class, but this article offers a more focused and productive way of both implementing reading practices in the writing classroom and evaluating their utility for developing writers.