Reading and writing are very closely related, and schools usually group them together under the umbrella of “language arts” classes. The most common way in which the two are connected in these classes is in the form of literary analysis; students are assigned a book, article, or other composition to read, and then they analyze it either on their own in an essay or with their classmates during discussion. While this process makes up the bulk of classwork (and the entirety of my job) in the writing center, the inverse is also observed; rather than writing about reading, tutors often read about writing, both to improve their own compositions and so that they can pass their knowledge down during their tutorials. The relationship between reading and writing, especially as it applies to the writing center, is particularly interesting to me. For this reason, Ellen Carillo’s 2017 article “Reading and Writing Centers: A Primer for Writing Center Professionals” recently caught my eye, and will be the subject of this commentary.

Early in her article, Carillo laments the neglect of reading in writing center theory. She isn’t wrong to do so. While tutoring practices in the writing center are meant to prioritize the student’s vision, it must be kept in mind that virtually every composition that students bring in will at some point cease to be writing and eventually become reading for a teacher, college admissions officer, or any number of people. Making writing more palatable to its eventual audience is certainly part of a tutor’s job; most every tutorial begins with the student reading their composition aloud, usually with the purpose of ironing out small mistakes or awkward phrasings that could confuse a reader. Putting the writer in the position of the reader is a key part of the writing process, both for the surface-level reasons described above and for deeper matters of meaning; Stephen North establishes–and Carillo cites–a difference between “retrospective” and “projective” structuring, with the former defining a piece to its writer and the latter defining it to its audience. A piece of writing can only be completely understood by its writer; the full depth of its argument, its structural and stylistic choices, and its ultimate purpose. However, for almost every paper that comes into the writing center, the ultimate judge of its success–whatever that may mean in the context of the specific paper–will not be its writer. For this reason, a writer must be able to view their paper from the reader’s perspective. Tutors are important as another set of eyes on a paper, people who can point out areas where a writer hasn’t quite made their point clear under the assumption that their reader will approach the paper with the same background knowledge and perspective as themselves. Nonetheless, writers should also be able to look at their own papers through the reader’s perspective.

How much experience, though, do most writers have as readers? A brief scroll through the archived Google Classroom pages for the English classes that I’ve taken in high school shows a steady decrease in the number of books that were assigned as part of the coursework. This is to say nothing of the general decline in people reading on their own time that, while difficult to quantify, can be observed just about anywhere in daily life. One could argue that the way in which reading is incorporated into school makes enjoying the assigned books (or any books at all) difficult, and they wouldn’t be entirely incorrect. There are plenty of other factors that have contributed to the decline of reading, but covering all of them would at least triple the word count of this article, so I will instead return to Carillo, who touches on issues of motivation. Earlier in the article, Carillo cited various authors in order to posit that reading and writing both play important parts in creating meaning. A good reader can clearly outline the deeper meaning of the text that they are reading, a good writer can clearly outline the deeper meaning of the text that they are writing, and a great reader or writer can understand meaning from both perspectives. But some don’t want to do these things. When discussing the ways in which meaning is formed by reading, Carillo states that “[s]tudents who do not believe they have this knowledge or do not believe that this knowledge will lead to better comprehension are not likely to engage the reading in these ways.” This can create a domino effect that reflects in a student’s writing; they don’t apply effective reading strategies to texts, either because they don’t want to or don’t think they can, fail to find meaning as a result, and ultimately stop looking. This creates general frustration towards reading as a whole, which in turn causes problems in their writing. Finding meaning in a text shows the student how to insert it into their own writing. On top of that, reading also shapes a writer’s vocabulary, style, and general grasp on the language, all of which greatly improves their compositions. When reading is done ineffectively or not at all, writing suffers as a result. All this can be stopped before it starts by encouraging students to apply these reading strategies and demonstrating how it can help them better understand texts that they might encounter in day-to-day life (news articles, for example), but most people’s first experience with literary analysis techniques almost always occurs outside the writing center, and therefore this encouragement must happen there as well.

The writing center, while not primarily focused on improving students’ reading, can still serve this purpose. Carillo cites Mike Bunn’s concept of “reading like a writer” and argues that it could be easily incorporated into writing centers. Bunn describes “reading like a writer” as examining texts to determine how they were written, focusing on the rhetorical choices made by an author. These choices are easy to miss if one does not look for them; word choice, figurative language, structure, and countless other aspects of a composition can be employed in any number of ways to elicit a certain response from the reader, or different responses from different readers. This is another important part of writing center tutoring; in addition to providing a new perspective on a piece of writing, in the case of literary analysis papers, tutors can also provide a new perspective on pieces of reading. However, this is only possible if the tutor is familiar with the piece being analyzed, either because they have read it before or because the student brings the piece in question with them to the tutorial; the latter case may, unfortunately, not be of much use in the shorter sessions of Lane’s writing center. Nonetheless, a tutor’s role as a second set of eyes on a student’s writing is also useful to the reading that the student might be analyzing, and the tutor’s demonstration of effective reading strategies could serve as an example that the student could follow for themselves on later assignments.

Reading and writing are inseparable, and this connection ought to be accounted for both in language classes and in the writing center. This is already done in some ways; students are often taught to determine the author’s purpose in their readings, and, as mentioned above, writing center sessions almost always begin with efforts to make compositions more accessible to readers at the surface level. Understanding how their writing will be viewed by its eventual reader is a key part of being an effective writer, and tutors can help students better understand this aspect of their compositions.