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Writing Responsively |
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As you noted while considering a strategy of rereading, the reader builds throughout the stages to the complex task of forming critical/analytical responses. Writing goes through a similar process of building to more complex statements that take rereadings into account. Early stages of writing might include notes, highlighting passages, journal response statements, even summaries and paraphrases of difficult passages. Frequently, after understanding the elements of the work better, a student of literature can write about the formal aspects of the work; but a reader may also choose to describe in a formal paper his or her personal, cultural and ideological responses. Kathleen McCormick, Gary Waller and Linda Flower, in their book, Reading Texts: Reading, Responding, Writing (D.C. Heath, 1987), list the various ways a student can write about literature; they also discuss these techniques in terms of their advantages and disadvantages. They group the strategies as Text-Based/Reader-Based tasks or as Interactive ones. Compare their list with the traditional tasks you have probably learned to do in school. Text-Based/Reader-Based Task Definitions (each link takes you to the explanation listed below)
Interactive Task Definitions
The explanations that follow summarize and comment on their definitions. You will also find a four step process to follow in writing response statements. "Text-based and Reader-based" Tasks Most agree with the McCormick, Waller and Flower text that a summary will get the gist, try to be objective, literal, and complete, outlining in the writer's own words what the text says. The student tries to cover the important parts of the story, poem or drama. While this is often an essential aspect of writing about literature, it is also not a complete response, not a critical essay, and not the best place to start for writing a response (which starts with the reader's response). It is, along with paraphrasing and quoting, a very Text-based activity. I am sure you can see why. And it is, in fact, an excellent strategy for keeping track of what you read, for making sure you understand what you read, and for making sure a reader knows the basics of a work you intend to discuss in more depth. You will probably be asked to write summaries and paraphrases of what you read, especially if the writing will help clarify a difficult work. Of course, everyone needs to learn to summarize efficiently and fairly, to quote and to punctuate accurately and correctly. Free-associating, on the other hand, is a Reader-based activity. It may be what we think we are being asked to do when asked to "respond" to a text rather than to "analyze" it. We may feel we are being asked to be subjective and follow our mind's free wandering to what the work reminded us of. When we relate the term "free-associating" to "free-writing," i.e. the invention strategy that encourages the writer to write whatever pops into the mind, then we can see why a student might take off from the text to reminisce about anything that seems personally related. But if we don't connect this wandering back to the goals of a group of readers, the group that wants to understand the piece of literature better, we can see how easily the reader of this free-associating response might get impatient and wonder how this helps us understand the original text. Free-associating is especially good for journaling about your reading, and it is crucial for identifying and exploring your feelings about a work. It is an excellent place to begin when you are trying to become aware of how your general and literary repertoires or "schema" have shaped your associations and subjective responses. But it is also incomplete unless you come back to the work and the process of reading it. Interpretation is one of the strategies for "explaining the text." Interpretations (critical analyses) tend to make definitive statements about a work's meaning and then attempt to argue for them by talking about how the work is put together through a description of its elements such as its plot, point of view, characterization, diction, and so on. Interpretation grows from working with description and analysis of the work. The argument for the interpretation then takes the important "parts" of the work discovered in the analysis and uses them to provide evidence for the "theme" or general idea which the interpreter has discovered. You can see from this description that this is also a very text-based strategy. It is also a very good strategy to use when you wish to learn more about the formal features of the work and its literary repertoire. The writer is required to focus on them and to display the results of that attention for the reader of his or her critical paper. So a paper of this type is also a test of the essay writer's knowledge of literary features of works. Since you want to learn to analyze the formal features (or repertoire) of works, you will want to learn how to use this strategy in many critical essays. With strengths like that, what could its weaknesses be? According to McCormick, Waller and Flower, it has some:
Shifting the focus from the text itself, to the relationships among the reader and the work and the community (culture and audience) frees everyone to understand what constructs our experiences and our dialog over it. Their "Interactive Task Definitions"-- According to McCormick, Waller and Flower, the first step toward an Interactive approach focused on both you and the text, is to pay attention to, and to record, your own "initial reactions" to the text. Many readers are not used to being asked to do this. As students we assume the request is confused and what the teacher really wants are our ideas and conclusions about what the work meant--in other words for us to perform a text-based interpretation of the "meaning" or "message." Make no mistake, self-conscious responding asks the reader to become aware of how the story, poem, or play has made him or her feel. Feelings, sometimes called affective responses, are rarely brought out in the classroom. While readers are not usually asked, sometimes, when they are asked, they can feel their feelings are not appropriate. Sometimes our feelings about what we read are negative, so much so, we don't even want to keep reading. Sometimes we feel inadequate in coping with a difficult work. I know I have felt that way. That is OK. All of us have a right to feel the way our lives have prepared us to feel about what we read. The key thing here is to recognize our feelings. What sort of feelings? Literary works often make people feel "interest, excitement, confusion, suspense, identification with characters, terror, anger--even boredom" according to McCormick, Waller and Flower. I would add that we should list the entire range of human emotion to complete the picture, for literature has evoked them all. It is also possible, however, for a reader to have a less passionate response, a more distant, cognitively controlled reaction or intellectual interest. We also might recognize the work's strategy of trying to appeal to our emotions and decide to resist it. We might find our emotions registering different responses at different times. The feelings might come on us suddenly. They might hit us only after we have put the work aside for a while. While the response might be very positive or very negative, leading a reader to say "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" as a response, the goal is to move beyond these initial judgmental feelings to a consideration of the complex of emotions that led to them. If the feelings were negative, were you disgusted, bored, embarrassed, ashamed, uncomfortable, irritated or what? A responsive reader should try to elaborate on any responses he or she can identify--good or bad. If you were affected positively, where you entranced, enchanted, thrilled, absorbed or what? The next goal is to go on to identify how the text created that effect. This is a natural next step. We want to explain what we noticed in the work that made us react this way. But that is only half the task. We also need to notice what it is in ourselves that made us react this way. According the McCormick, Waller and Flower, these are the two aspects to this phase of analysis:
If a reader attends to both parts of this he or she will not assume that the reaction occurred because the text was a certain way--in "reality." For example, a reader would not say, "I was bored because the story was boring." Or "I was excited because the story was exciting." Notice the circular thinking in that. Instead the reader would want to work out the interaction between the text and the reader.
Analyzing your response both cognitively and culturally Once we have a clear sense of our response and what in ourselves and the text caused it, we can go on to analyze how our reading strategies and assumptions that led to our response fit into a larger context. How common or uncommon do you see this response to be? Might there be another way to read this work which would have different results? Here we need to understand various reading strategies so we can begin to identify our own and consider other options. Can we see or apply other "schemata"? A reader also can put responses in the even broader context of cultural ideologies and values. Reading about Critical Approaches, for example, will give an introduction to the various ways that critics generalize about types of responses and the ideas (theories) that structure them. The goal of becoming more self-reflective about what constructs our readings is to develop the power to resist in some acts of reading and to develop power for others; to recognize that the alternative readings that other people create come from different and worthy assumptions and experiences and not because they are wrong-headed. Finally we should come to expect our readings to grow and mature as we reread and learn more about ourselves and text strategies. Summary of Directions for Writing a Response Statement--four steps 1. Begin with your reaction. Be sure you develop your affective response. Review the section above on self-consciously responding if you need to. Write at least a brief paragraph about your emotional response--several sentences at least. 2. What did the text contribute to your reaction? Here you need to be explicit about what you noticed in the work that stimulated the reactions you named above. This means telling in some detail what you noticed in the text which helped effect your response. This should be an even more developed paragraph, one at least, perhaps more. You should strive to specify passages, even quote the material that you reacted to. Refer back to the section on the text's contribution if you need to. 3. What did my general and literary repertoire (or schemata) and my reading strategies contribute to my reaction? This paragraph should reflect on yourself and your more general experiences and beliefs which fostered such responses. The sentences should be "I" statements such as "When I read a story, I generally expect. . ." or "My sense of how children should be treated made me react to. . .". Refer back to the section on the reader's contribution if you need to. This also should be one or more full paragraphs. 4. What does your process of reading this work tell you about youself as a reader and your culture more broadly? What about the general culture or literary repertoire seems most related to your reading? Were you deploying or resisting general and dominant ideologies? Do you see any other possible ways to read and react? Try to expand and generalize what you learned from your understanding your encounter with this work. Following these steps in either journal entries or for essays will result in an honest and usually interesting appraisal of your intial reading of the text. Often this is also called a Resisting reading because your analysis of cultural and literary repertoires brings to consciousness how you were or were not resisting ideologies. Here is a site which offers an example of a "resisting reading." It comes from the University of Texas American Studies Learning Skills site <http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/ams/lskills/fuller.htm>. Here are some links to other pages on this site that might prove helpful. |
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