Ellen C. Carillo - A Writers Guide to Mindful Reading

A Writers Guide to Mindful Reading

Ellen C. Carillo

University of Connecticut

The WAC Clearinghouse
wac.colostate.edu
Fort Collins, Colorado

University Press of Colorado
upcolorado.com
Boulder, Colorado

Practice and Pedagogy

Series Editor: Mike Palmquist

The Practice & Pedagogy series addresses the teaching, learning, and practice of writing in all its forms. From Joseph Williams reflections on introductions to Richard E. Youngs taxonomy of small genres to Adam Mackies considerations of technology, the books in this occasional series explore issues and ideas of interest to writers and teachers of writing.

The WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University Open Press, and University Press of Colorado are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the Series editor are committed to the principle that knowledge should freely circulate. We see the opportunities that new technologies have for further democratizing knowledge. And we see that to share the power of writing is to share the means for all to articulate their needs, interest, and learning into the great experiment of literacy.

Other Books in the Series

Lillian Craton, Rene Love, & Sean Barnette (Eds.), Writing Pathways to Student Success (2017)

Charles Bazerman, Involved: Writing for College, Writing for Your Self (2015)

Adam Mackie , New Literacies Dictionary: Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner (2011)

Patricia A. Dunn , Learning Re-abled: The Learning Disability Controversy and Composition Studies (2011)

Richard E. Young, Toward A Taxonomy of Small Genres and Writing Techniques for Writing Across the Curriculum (2011)

Joseph M. Williams, Problems into PROBLEMS: A Rhetoric of Motivation (2011)

Charles Bazerman, The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines (2011)

Publication Information

The WAC Clearinghouse, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-1040

University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80303

2017 by Ellen C. Carillo, . This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.

ISBN 978-1-64215-027-8 (PDF) | 978-1-64215-028-5 (ePub) | 978-1-60732-777-6 (pbk.)

Produced in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carillo, Ellen C., author.

Title: A writers guide to mindful reading / Ellen C. Carillo.

Description: Fort Collins, Colorado : The WAC Clearinghouse ; Boulder, Colorado : University Press of Colorado, [2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2017039386| ISBN 9781607327776 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781607327783 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Reading (Higher education) | English languageRhetoricStudy and teaching (Higher) | Academic writingStudy and teaching (Higher) | Reading comprehensionStudy and teaching (Higher) | College reading improvement programs.

Classification: LCC LB2395.3 .C36 2017 | DDC 428.40711dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039386

Copyeditor: Brandy Bippes

Designers: Mike Palmquist and Ashley Freeman

Cover Art: Joseph A. Gerber

Series Editor: Mike Palmquist

The WAC Clearinghouse supports teachers of writing across the disciplines. Hosted by Colorado State University, and supported by the Colorado State Univeristy Open Press, it brings together scholarly journals and book series as well as resources for teachers who use writing in their courses. This book is available in digital formats for free download at wac.colostate.edu.

Permissions

Charles Bazerman, A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversation Model. Copyright 1980 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

Mike Bunn, Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom. Copyright 2013 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

David A. Jolliffe and Allison Harl, Studying the Reading Transition from High School to College: What Are Our Students Reading and Why? Copyright 2008 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

Anthony Petrosky, From Story to Essay: From Reading to Writing. Copyright 1982 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

Mariolina Salvatori, Reading and Writing a Text: Correlations between Reading and Writing Patterns. Copyright 1983 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

Robert Scholes, The Transition to College Reading. Copyright 2002 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

Robert J. Tierney and David Pearson, Toward a Composing Model of Reading. Copyright 1983 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

Stacey Waite, On the Occasion of Being Mistaken for a Man by Security Personnel at Newark International Airport from Butch Geography , published by Tupelo Press. Copyright 2013 by Stacey Waite. Used with permission.

Sarah Davis, The Blurred Lines Effect: Popular Music and the Perpetuation of Rape Culture. Copyright 2014 by Sarah Davis. Used with permission.

OUP Blog Entries. Oxford University Press. Used with permission.

Wendell Berry, Environmentalists Have Given Up too Much by Not Being Radical Enough. Copyright Grist.org. Used with permission.

Amelia Urry, If you Think Technology Has no Place in the National Parks, Think Again. Copyright Grist.org. Used with permission.

The Pace of Modern Life. Copyright xkcd.com. Used with permission.

Derrick Jensen, Forget Shorter Showers. Copyright Orion Magazine . Used with permission.

Introduction

What is Mindful Reading?

Before we get to mindful reading , lets answer what at first might seem like the simpler question: What is reading? Reading is something we all do every daywe read books, street signs, text messages, blogs, product labels, billboardsbut have you ever stopped to think about what happens when we read? How does your brain process the marks your eyes see? How are these marks understood as letters, words, and sentences that have meaning? Research has shown that when we read, different regions and systems in the brain play different roles. Neuroscientists at Princeton University, Tanja Kassuba and Sabine Kastner, explain that the visual system and language regions of the brain work together to translate the marks we see on a page into words we can understand. Did you know that our eyes hardly move as they do all of this work? We might think that as we read our eyes move smoothly along the words as we read them, but, instead, our eyes remain largely motionless since eyes can only see when they are in this state. Between these motionless periods, our eyes move very rapidly, jumping along the lines, again with little reference to the words before us (Rayner).

Cognitive psychologists, who research the brain, have conducted various experiments to study the power of reading. For example, in his book Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction , Keith Oatley argues that reading fiction (stories) provides such a vivid simulation of real life that the brain processes a detailed description of an experience one may find in a novel in the same way it would process the actual experience. Equally interesting is that Raymond A. Mar and his colleagues, including Oatley, conducted experiments that ultimately showed that people who read fiction are more empathetic than those who do not. Mar and his colleagues argue that this is the case because fiction offers the unique opportunity to identify with characters, something that fiction readers take with them beyond the text and into real life situations.