Entry 1 Prompt: Analyzing My Own Approach to Reading and Writing Tasks

     Before reading the Tierny and Pearson article, I used to think of the reading and the writing process as two different entities with similar characteristics that would cross over each other. For example, when I thought about the writing process when it comes to drafting, I thought about how I actively plan out my writing; I plan out the introduction, include different transition words in between paragraphs depending on the content of whatever I was writing, and then pull quotes from the text I was citing and file those into different paragraphs. When I thought about the reading process, I never really considered drafting my reading the same way that I draft my writing. One new way that Tierny and Pearson have challenged me to look at this drafting process in a new way is to find the right “lead” in a piece of literature, or to taste test a reading to find if it is a good fit for me. I usually dive directly into readings before drafting them and figuring out what I am going to be reading, but this article has made me want to take a step back and draft out those pieces of literature. In addition, Tierny and Pearson write that, “While it is common to think of a writer as a reviser, it is not common to think of a reader as someone who revises…” and until this article, I had thought and acted the same (p. 576); I revise my writing significantly more than I revise my reading. Now, when I come across a reading, I will reflect back on my annotations and judge whether or not my thoughts have changed or if I can offer any different perspectives that did not occur to me during the first read through. 

Regarding the Tompkins reading and the activities of “pre-writing” and “planning/drafting,” only until the recent start of my undergraduate degree at Nazareth did I start to consider purpose, audience, and genre. For example, for this blog though I consider my audience to be my professor and my classmates, it is more of an informal read than papers that I have turned into my professors before. I registered that the purpose of these blog posts is to reflect on my own writing, and therefore, my responses may not be as formal as an academic paper that I turn in at the end of a semester. With everything that I write, these are the first ideas that I consider before I begin to write. 

With these blogs, I will definitely consider to pre-write and thinking about what I want to say before I say it, and to keep in mind the purpose of these and who will be reading it as an end result. One activity that I have used and will continue to use is to comb through the text and target direct quotes from the text that I want to talk about or I can center my ideas around. Additionally, when I am done writing, I will always revise my writing as well as dive back into the text and think of new ideas that I can incorporate into my blog that I had not previously thought of before. When it comes to my Genre Pieces Project, I am not sure of what topic I want to write about yet, but I know that when I do have topics or ideas that come to mind, I will start a brainstorm list of those topics and then do some light research as to directions I could take the project in.