1. Citation:

Carillo, Ellen C. “Engaging Sources through Reading-Writing Connections Across the Disciplines.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 13, no. 2, July 2016, p. 19.

2. Summary

Carillo aims to demonstrate how in a system where we emphasize the importance of “discipline-specific literacy” we are falling short by privileging writing over reading. She argues for the reinstatement of  disciplinary reading instruction in conjunction to disciplinary writing instruction. She states that this leads to students who do not know how to appropriately access and interact with texts, leading to writing that appears to be plagiarism. This is due to the fact that students are patch-working the source. Instead of viewing sources, they are viewing sentences. This leads to students attempting to mash together piece of texts via paraphrasing and copying because they cannot fully comprehend the source as a whole. Carillo offers a solution through specific disciplinary-reading instruction, and urging instructors to take the time to teach their students the specific skills needed to comprehend texts in their field.

In the second half of the article Carillo offers sample assignments. These can be adapted for any discipline, and are designed to teach students how to properly engage with texts. Carillo walks through each assignment explaining that each one progresses from a narrow to wide scope of the source. She concludes with a warning: if we, as instructors, do not take the time to teach our students how to access the texts assigned in our courses, we will continue to find writings that fall short due to lack of comprehension of texts.

3. Quote Bank

As Horning describes, instructors must deliberately teach reading in conjunction with writing if they want their students to use sources appropriately. In fact, an inability to use sources correctly—to critically assess, read, and respond to them— can very quickly turn into what appears to be plagiarism (2).

The shift away from print-based reading to digital reading practices has meant that instructors and students now must navigate what Daniel Keller (2013) calls “a wide range of ever-changing literacy contexts” (p. 9). Evolving technologies mean that instructors must help students “gain versatile, dexterous approaches to both reading and writing” (p. 9) that “reflect the dynamic range of contexts and media in which students will read and write” (p. 7). Unfortunately, as skimming and scanning are the go-to reading practice for onscreen reading, students (and the rest of us) are potentially becoming less adept at reading closely and deeply when we need to (2).

While Scholes is not interested in issues of academic integrity, when brought to fruition, his wish that we could see reading opens up opportunities for instructors to work with their students on reading and, therefore, on engaging and writing from sources. Making reading visible renders it possible for instructors and students to discuss what it means to engage—to read—sources and then work responsibly with them. The assignments described below are intended to do just that—to make reading visible (3).

Many students come to college already having been asked to annotate or mark up a text they are reading. Unfortunately, instead of annotating as it is described in this first assignment in the sequence, many students rely too heavily on highlighting. Annotating provides an alternative to highlighting that allows students to write notes, comments, reactions, and questions in the margins of their texts to make those texts uniquely theirs and to represent their particular ways of reading (3).

For students, slowing down gives them the opportunity to become aware of what it feels like to actively make sense of something. And, for the instructor, it means the opportunity to both see students’ processes and to intervene in productive ways in those processes (6).

It is through their close readings of these passages—whether in lab reports or other texts—that students learn about the conventions that govern writing within that discipline. Moreover, noticing and writing about these textual elements help reveal for students their processes of reading and makes them aware of the fact that they—as writers—will need to keep readers in mind (6).

With its intense focus on reading, including adaptations of the assignments described in this piece, students quickly realize that “reading,” although nowhere in the nomenclature used to describe research-driven writing courses, is equally as important as writing. In fact, in end-of-semester evaluations many students described the importance of spending time on reading, noting the benefits, for example of “thinking critically (both in the paper and while reading);” “actively reading;” “annotating;” “improving my skills evaluating sources;” and “learning how to close read and take apart certain articles.” Paying deliberate attention to reading as we teach students how to conduct research in our fields is a crucial step toward giving them the tools to avoid “plagiarizing.” (13)

4. Reflection

I sought out this particular source because of a conversation Jo and I had during our last class. Her, Destiny and I are in a group for the teaching performance, and we are interested in the topic of reading. Both Jo and I expressed how we are frustrated by the lack of reading instruction or emphasis. Destiny spoke up here, and commented that while it may sound weird as an MA student, she hated reading in undergrad. This comment got me thinking about why people have an aversion to reading, and I began to wonder if it had to do with access. Can students properly access the readings assigned to them? Have they been given the tools needed to digest the texts in their discipline?

We don’t give infants whole sandwiches and expect them to know how to eat it in one go…we cut it up in bite size pieces. We hand feed, and guide them until they can feed themselves. In our current system where writing and reading are unequally favored, we are handing infants sandwiches and expecting them to eat it whole. Similarly, we don’t expect infants to know that one eats soup differently than how one eat top sirloin. If this is the case, they why do we expect our students to know that one should read, approach and access, a psychology case study differently than a sonnet?

Ellen Carillo does a great job at offering a practical and directly applicable solution to this problem. Carillo includes her own assignments she designed that incorporate reading-instruction into any discipline. I would like to implement Carillo’s mini curriculum into my own classroom. This article also got me thinking about focusing on reading-writing correlations for the writing studies research proposal project. Carillo makes it clear that reading and writing both need to be visible and present in the classroom.