What Should Students Do with Text?: From Interpretation to Interrogation
Over the first week or so of my first-year writing seminars, I carefully explain to students that the course is not an English class, but a composition class.
Most students have experienced writing assignments primarily in English classes and often anchored to literary analysis (interpreting fiction and poetry grounded in New Criticism or “close reading” assumptions about analysis).
In our composition class, we explore many texts, but are mostly examining non-fiction and the essay form. A guiding structure I used with high school students (including those preparing to take Advanced Placement exams in literature) and continue to use in first-year writing is to ask the following questions when engaging with text:
- What is the author saying or arguing?
- How is the author making that case?
- Why does it matter to the reader?
The transition I am addressing for composition courses is away from literary analysis, interpreting text, and toward reading like a writer, interrogating text (something my students encounter in John Warner’s The Writer’s Practice).
However that same transition should also occur in literary analysis since CONTINUE READING: What Should Students Do with Text?: From Interpretation to Interrogation – radical eyes for equity