The Reciprocal Nature of Reading and Writing
When you read, you have to seek information, and you are confronted with different views, which forces you to consider your own position. In this process, the reader is converted to a "writer", whether or not he writes or publishes his own ideas.
Reading and writing are thus reciprocal processes, reading is an active process, and the best way to learn critical reading is probably by training academic writing.
Bazerman (1994) writes about the active role of the reader, and remarks (p. 23): "The cure for real boredom is to find a more advanced book on the subject; the only cure for pseudo-boredom is to become fully and personally involved in the book already in front of you". Bazerman's book is informed by an advanced theoretical knowledge of scholarly research, documents and their composition. For example, chapter 6 is about "Recognizing the many voices in a text". The practical advises given are based on textual theory (Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva). Chapter 8 is titled "Evaluating the book as a whole: The book review", and the first heading is "books as tools".
Read more about this topic: Critical Reading
Famous quotes containing the words reciprocal, nature, reading and/or writing:
“I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“If I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable auspices, I would go to it in foul weather, so as to be there when it cleared up; we are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. There is no serenity so fair as that which is just established in a tearful eye.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“I don’t really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven’t seen anybody all day.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)