The Three Essays from Deep Reading:

Sullivan, Patrick, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau, Eds. Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom. NCTE, 2017.

• Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Jacob W. Craig, Matthew Davis, and Michael Spooner. “Device. Display. Read: The Design of Reading and Writing and the Difference Display Makes.” pp. 33-56.
• Harris, Muriel. “Writing Centers are also Reading Centers: How Could They Not Be?” pp. 227-243.
• Tinberg, Howard. “When Writers Encounter Reading in a Community College First-Year Composition Course.” pp. 244-265.

Muriel Harris’s essay on writing and reading in Writing Centers spends some time in thinking about how digital technology has impacted reading. Students now do much of their reading online, and many have responded to surveys acknowledging that they “would rather communicate with pictures than words” (232, qtd. from other sources). She cites studies which talk about reading behaviors which results in time spent in “browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, non-linear reading, and reading selectively” rather than doing “in-depth reading” and “concentrated reading” (Zinming Lui 700; Harris 231). She also finds studies which talk about the drain on mental resources of reading in digital formats, the loss of the “tactile experiences of reading on paper,” and difficulty navigating longer texts in a digital screen environment (Ferris Jabr; Harris 232). And reading hypertext involves many decisions on the part of the reader that can diminish deep reading.

As a teacher of writing, I’ve always understood how first-generation students, ELL students, and students with disabilities (environmental, physical, or mental) might struggle with reading mentor texts, my writing to them, and fellow students’ writing (all of this Harris discusses). I had not, however, considered how much more complicated reading comprehension, much less interpretation, might be when the reading material was presented in a digital format. Most online classes require a substantial amount of online reading, even if there is a purchased print copy text for the class. Harris has caused me to wonder how to build in reading strategies and training into an online writing class as partner to the writing instruction.

At the same time, I suspect that I don’t feel entirely adequate to address how to help my students read, and this lack of preparation to do this is escalated by the realities of the online environment. Tinberg quotes Harkin’s (422) research citing that 51 percent of instructors of FYW who were interviewed “were not secure in their abilities to teaching reading” (247). And now the process of reading is complicated further with hypertext and digital affordances found in online texts of all kinds. Tinberg notices the shift to genre-based writing instruction in which texts in the course serve as mentor texts for student writing. So, as students learn the discourse in a field or mode, they practice it as well. He suggests that having students do the same metacognitive reflection on reading process alongside writing process would likely assist in better and deeper reading (248).

One of the learning goals in Emory’s FYW is clearly connected to the reading-to-writing initiative:

Outcome 2: Critical Thinking and Reading Resulting in Writing. As they undertake scholarly inquiry and produce their own arguments, students summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the ideas of others.

Students may encounter the ideas of others in a variety of texts generated both inside and outside the classroom: print, visual, aural, oral, spatial. Students learn accepted and ethical ways to integrate other texts into their work, rightly handling citation and adaptation. Students use writing as a critical thinking tool.

Surely, one of the best things about genre-shifting assignments, which are so beneficial and useful in a digital environment (prose, to presentation, to representation, to aural or visual forms) is that understanding of the mentor texts and repeating and applying what is read there and in assignments is practiced enough times, to really catch hold and interpret the meaning of the reading assignments. In working through how to sift genres, the writer must internalize the texts, grapple with them, and figure out how to display them in multiple modes for a reader. And if the teacher incorporates reflection along the way? Pure gold. Tinberg provides some fine examples of reflective writing on reading process and web-writing, along with how to get students to engage in better dialog with the teacher’s response writing by having students first summarize and then respond.

Yancey, Craig, Davis, and Spooner, in their article in the same volume Deep Reading, also bemoan the lack of attention reading gets in rhetoric/composition scholarship. They directly attempt to deal with the varying kinds of electronic texts, underlying issues influencing the ways we read, and how to help students read in the multi-media landscape. I’ll note that even in f2f classes, helping students navigate the world of digital texts well is a need. Because scholars have viewed both reading practices (marking texts) and writing practices as material practices, it is not surprising that most scholarship has focused on print.

Previous scholars have identified some categories to help understand electronic reading. Berhardt lists “nine dimensions of variation hat help map the differences between paper and on-screen text”: situationally embedded, interactive, functionally mapped, modular, navigable, hierarchically embedded, spacious, graphically rich, and customizable and publishable. Later, Sosnoski does the same thing with hyper-readers: filtering, skimming, pecking, imposing, filming, trespassing, de-authorizing, fragmenting (ctd. in Yancey, et. al. 36). These factors seem to be in contrast to the kind of deep dive we often think of as “critical reading or thinking.” But is it? Or is it a “different kind of deep, continuing reading from that we see in print, one more oriented to our experiencing the text” (37). Makers of devices that permit e-reading tout “responsive design” or “responsive architecture” (39). This allows the reader to participate in shaping the reading experience. This impacts the classroom in that students may not all be having the same reading experience! While a print book offers stability, heft, and reading free from distraction, an e-text has flexibility, search-ability, supplemental materials. It is worth noting that (42) students surveyed reported that 90 percent of them multitask when reading online which only one percent multitask when reading a print book. But the survey also reports that annotating a pint document has declined greatly (they want to resell their books). The authors suggest three strategies. First, they suggest giving the student a familiar text (like a syllabus) and use design principles to make it more meaningful (design awareness). Second, they give a reading inventory, asking them to identify media and devices they use to read, along with note taking practices (reflection on practice). And third, they suggest a series of various annotation exercises in which the students experiment with their own reading practices (awareness of modulation).            

When students begin thinking about the “how” of reading, they report reading fatigue with e-texts, technical troubles, but they also reported that they were beginning to think differently (54). I can’t help but think of Ong’s work and the return to a kind of secondary orality. Reading is changing, just as it does with genre—it also changes with mode of delivery. Literacy generally is changing. In a purely online format, the student is likely to be learning adaptive practices to have the flexibility of movement from mode to mode. Flexibility is a valuable skill, and might certainly lead to development of a flexible, genre-shifting writer. But people with disabilities might not have the luxury of such shifting easily. It’s interesting that the three articles in Deep Reading which talked about digital texts, say nothing about accessibility or accommodation. Clearly, work needs be done on reading e-texts with a disability which leads to writing, and this goes beyond vision impairment. Students with ADD will find the digital affordances themselves distracting. When students notify teachers of disabilities, immediate attention to making a deep reading journey possible for the student must be attended to. If we don’t help them read, we won’t be able to help them improve their writing either.