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Using Reading in the Writing Process Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Many people view writing as the making of reading, but the connection does not end there. We know that one of the best ways to learn to write and to improve our writing is to read. By reading, we can begin to see how other writers have communicated their experiences, ideas, thoughts, and feelings in their writing. We can study how they have effectively used the various elements of the essay — thesis, unity, organization, beginnings and endings, paragraphs, transitions, effective sentences, diction and tone, and figurative language — to say what they wanted to say. By studying the style, technique, and rhetorical strategies of other writers, we learn how we might effectively do the same. The more we read and write, the more we begin to read as writers and, in turn, to write knowing what readers expect.

Reading as a Writer

What does it mean to read as a writer? As mentioned earlier, most of us have not been taught to read with a writer’s eye, to ask why we like one piece of writing and not another. Similarly, most of us do not ask ourselves why one piece of writing is more convincing than another. When you learn to read with a writer’s eye, you begin to answer these important questions. You read beyond the content to see how certain aspects of the writing itself affect you. You come to appreciate what is involved in selecting and focusing on a subject as well as the craftsmanship involved in writing: how a writer selects descriptive details, uses an unobtrusive organizational pattern, opts for fresh and lively language, chooses representative and persuasive examples, and emphasizes important points with sentence variety. You come to see writing as a series of decisions the writer makes.

On one level, reading stimulates your thinking by providing you with subjects to write about. For example, after reading Helen Keller’s “The Most Important Day,” you might take up your pen to write about a turning point in your life. Or by reading Carl T. Rowan’s “Unforgettable Miss Bessie” and Thomas L. Friedman’s “My Favorite Teacher,” you might see how each of these writers creates a dominant impression of an influential person in his or her life, leading you to write about an influential person in your own life.

On a second level, reading provides you with information, ideas, and perspectives for developing your own essay. In this way, you respond to what you read, using material from what you’ve read in your essay. For example, after reading June Tangney’s essay “Condemn

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the Crime, Not the Person,” you might want to elaborate on what she has written and either agree with her examples or generate ones of your own. You could also qualify her argument or take issue with it. Similarly, if you want to write about the effects of new technologies and engineering on our health and well-being, you will find Julie Zhuo’s “Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt” and Christina Baker Kline’s “Taking My Son to College, Where Technology Has Replaced Serendipity” invaluable resources.

On a third level, critical reading can increase your awareness of how others’ writing affects you, thus making you more sensitive to how your own writing will affect your readers. For example, if you have ever been impressed by an author who uses convincing evidence to support each of his or her claims, you might be more likely to back up your own claims carefully. If you have been impressed by an apt turn of phrase or absorbed by a writer’s new idea, you may be less inclined to feed your readers dull, worn-out, and trite phrases.

More to the point, however, the critical reading that you are encouraged to do in Models for Writers will help you recognize and analyze the essential elements of the essay. When you see, for example, how a writer such as Julie Zhuo uses a strong thesis statement to control the parts of her essay calling for the elimination of anonymous comments on the Internet, you can better appreciate what a clear thesis statement is and see the importance of having one in your essay. When you see the way Maya Wei-Haas uses transitions to link key phrases and important ideas so that readers can clearly recognize how the parts of her essay are meant to flow together, you have a better idea of how to achieve such coherence in your own writing. And when you see how Martin Luther King Jr. divides the ways in which people characteristically respond to oppression into three distinct categories, you witness a powerful way in which you, too, can organize an essay using division and classification.

Another important reason, then, to master the skills of critical reading is that for everything you write, you will be your own first reader and critic. How well you are able to scrutinize your own drafts will powerfully affect how well you revise them, and revising well is crucial to writing well. So reading others’ writing with a critical eye is a useful and important practice; the more you read, the more skilled you will become at seeing the rhetorical options available to you and making conscious choices in your own writing.