Writing Studio

Month: February 2025

Writing is Reading

February 24, 2025 / / 0 Comments
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” -Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

The best way to improve your writing is to read more. That might sound like a hot take, but hear us out! Reading and writing may seem like polar opposites, like input vs output, but they’re actually pretty similar cognitive processes. Both involve the ability to remember and recognize different words and sentences styles, can develop attention span and  processing speed, and might even be related to cognitive health.

On a more practical level, reading lots of different genres (thinking fantasy vs autobiography, but also think short-form journalism vs social media posts) exposes us to different styles of self-expression. Moreover, the ways that we read are often part of our process for building arguments in college writing. Think about how many times you have been asked to analyze a source or “close read” a text. So for today’s post, we’re going to spend a little time thinking about this particular skill that college writers are so often asked to exercise.

What is close reading? 

Different fields can have slightly different definitions of (or uses for) the term, but in a nutshell this is a form of analysis that uses careful and deep examination of the details of a text. A reader might ask questions about the form of a text, it’s production context, literary or rhetorical devices at play, and specific word choices. These questions form the basis of all sorts of intellectual inquiry, and will provide the evidence that scholar uses to make an argument about a text.

How do I do a close reading?

  1.  Treat the text as an object and ask questions about:
  • argument: what is it arguing, for what audience? How does it communicate its main ideas?
  • structure and form: what comes first? What comes next? How is it presented? What tone, imagery, and language does it use?
  • production: in what social context was it created and for what consumer?
  • author: what do we know about the author? How does that context show up in the text?
  1. Treat the text as a work of art and ask questions about:
  • clarity: is it easy to understand, and if not, why?
  • patterns: are words or images repeated? Why?
  • mood: how does the text evoke a certain mood?
  • syntax: how does the arrangement of words affect meaning?
  1. Annotate** the text by highlighting interesting words or phrases, looking up words you don’t know, paying attention to conflicts, patterns, and emotions, and writing questions in the margins.

**Annotation will be the subject of our next blog post!

Exercise ideas:

  1. Pick 1 paragraph from a class reading and choose one topic from the list above to focus on. Spend 5 minutes re-reading and annotating the paragraph, then spend 5 minutes free-writing at least 4 sentences about that paragraph using those observations. Repeat with different focuses.
  2. Take a writing prompt from a class and do a close reading of it, treating the professor who wrote it as an unknown author and the prompt as a literary text.
  3. Listen to a brief song and think about how it makes you feel (or tries to make you feel). Think about the patterns and phrases of the song to identify how it achieves that.

How do I Use a Close Reading to Build an Argument?

1. Perform a close reading of your text to collect data. You may want to:

  • identify the main claim of the text
  • observe how the author makes their point persuasive
  • observe your reactions to the text; consider how the text created those reactions
  • examine what you know about the cultural context of your text and author (but you might also want to leave this out– sometimes it can be distracting to think about the author and the text)

2. Interpret/explain that data, answering the question “so what?”

  • In this step, you are making general claims that are grounded in textual evidence—in other words, you are arguing that the text creates meaning in a certain way.

3. Synthesize (draw connections or differences) between all the pieces of data that you have observed.

4. Observe your reactions to the text; consider how the text created those reactions.

5. Examine what you know about the cultural context of your text and author (but you might also want to leave this out– sometimes it can be distracting to think about the author and the text)

 

 

Writing is a Conversation

February 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Ask three different people what writing is and you’ll get three different answers. One person might tell you that it is the physical act of assigning visual forms to words and thoughts, of representing on paper (even digitally) our ideas. Another might say that writing is simply a form of communication, while the third might argue that writing is a way of making meaning.

It can be easy to default to thinking about writing mainly as the first two of these definitions, a tool for transferring ideas to paper, but it is in that meaning-making definition that the real meat of writing resides. Another way to think about this is to think of the social nature of writing: writing always has an audience, an reader that the author is somehow interacting with or trying to persuade. The stakes of that persuasion may be different–a text message to your friends inviting them to dinner at the caf feels very different than a grocery list written for yourself or an academic paper written for a class– but the interaction between author and audience is never absent.

Because of that, it can be helpful to think about writing as a conversation. You pitch yourself different depending on who you’re speaking to, right? Asking your best friend if you can borrow something of theirs should sound very different than asking a professor for a letter of recommendation! You would use different forms of address, you might build up to your ask in different ways, you’d probably pick different environments or times of day at which to ask, and even the intonations of your voice might even be different. While we can’t completely recreate those verbal cues of intonation in writing, we can influence how the reader “hears” us through our use of specific vocabulary, syntax (i.e. choices of grammar or sentence structure), and even formatting. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘tone‘ in writing.

For instance, in the paragraph above, I signaled a more personal tone by using the pronoun “you” and addressing you, my reader, directly. I signaled a slightly more informal tone by using some varying punctuation, both in the form of the rhetorical question and in the exclamation point. I used a contraction (“can’t” instead “cannot”) for the same reason. You can imagine how differently this post would read if I were prioritizing an impersonal and extremely formal tone (boring– that’s how it would read!) Those are all rhetorical decisions I made, decisions that I hope will effect how persuasive my argument is to you, and they are all decisions that I made with my audience in mind.

As you write this week, consider these questions:

  1. Who are you writing for? Your professor? Your peers? A fictional audience? 
  2. What information does that person need, and what do they already have? 
  3. What changes can you make to your tone to be as persuasive as possible?
  4. Would you be writing differently if you were only writing for yourself?

Happy writing!

 

 

The forecast calls for…Brainstorms!

February 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

 

Ever wondered where the term “brainstorm” comes from?” Well, for the Victorians it had a pseudo-scientific meaning, a literal derangement that might come along with an epileptic seizure; it was used figuratively, as well, to mean “a temporary loss of reason, a serious error of judgement” (all this according to the O.E.D., the best source available for going down etymological rabbit holes!) By the mid-1940s it was being used as a verb in a much more familiar way, “to analyse in a group discussion of spontaneously arising ideas”. I want to draw your attention to a few things in that O.E.D definition…

“…spontaneously arising ideas…”

In last week’s post I mentioned how easy it is to think of writing as the final product and not all the messy stuff that goes into creating that product. Brainstorming, a part of the pre-writing process (although of course it can happen at any stage when you’re writing!), is delightfully messy because it is all about letting your mind wander.

Here’s an example of one of my brainstorms, a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles. The three circles are labeled “Arachne”, “spider”, and “Proserpina”, and are meaningful to me. They might not make much sense to you though, because I wasn’t worrying, as I wrote this, about communicating my thoughts to someone else. Instead, I was focusing on getting my own ideas clear. If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s at least one question mark in there, and at least one made up word,  ways that I represent thoughts to myself. Sometimes my brainstorms looks like a post-it note with a list of questions; or a piece of paper that looks a lot like a spider web, with words connected by lines; or a few handwritten sentences on a printed out draft when I’m trying to figure out where to go next. I like to start on paper, but voice memos and the Notes App on your phone are also a great tools for brainstorming. The goal is not to articulate your ideas correctly or clearly, it’s to recognize what your ideas actually are!

 

Here’s another example of what a brainstorm might look like. This is an early outline of the first draft of the fourth chapter of my dissertation, and you can see a bunch of topics I wanted to write about labeled 1-4. There are a few quotes from authors that I noted down, there are thoughts to myself (“p. 92 she doesn’t get grief” is obviously a personal thought and shoes that I was thinking about how to push against the scholar I was reading), there are squiggly arrows connecting ideas, there are exclamation points, question marks, and moments where I decided had to use red ink for some reason. I wrote this after reading a bunch of scholarship and after writing a chunk of my first draft. I had gotten stuck, and didn’t know what to write next– getting away from the computer (and from full sentences) helps me discover coherent thoughts and get over a bout of writer’s block.

 

“…analyse in a group…”

If you click through the second O.E.D link above, you’ll realize that every use of “brainstorm” as a verb provided by the dictionary involves collaboration. Contrary to the popular myths about writing being a solitary experience, one of the core beliefs of any Writing Center is that writing happens in community. Writing is a form of conversation, of communication, so it kind of can’t be solitary, can it? You’re always writing to someone (even if that someone is yourself when you write a grocery list or in a journal). The topic for next week will be collaboration in the writing process, but in the meantime, consider experimenting a little with your brainstorming– maybe that means talking through an outline with someone before you start writing, or recording yourself thinking out-loud in a voice memo as you walk across campus between classes, or drawing a word web of concepts and questions. There’s no right or wrong, so give yourself permission to do something different!

 

Brainstorming Beyond College Writing

IDEO U Poster of Brainstorming Rules

Brainstorming is a tool with wide applicability. It’s a first step not only in writing, but in any sort of problem-solving or decision making endeavor. Industry careers of all sorts prioritize job applicants who think outside of the box, who are comfortable coming up with new ideas on the spot, whether or not those ideas pan out. Check out this infographic from IDEOU, an online school that grew out of a “global design and innovation company”. Brainstorming in this context is verbal, a team discussion that IDEOU defines as “an activity that will help you generate more innovative ideas. It’s one of many methods of ideation—the process of coming up with new ideas—and it’s core to the design thinking process.” That sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it!

 

 

Resources:

-The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center has a great list of different techniques for brainstorming.

-Book a session with a Writing Tutor today if you want to brainstorm together!

I always trust a pencil. Ink is too indelible and it inhibits me. There is comfort in knowing that my first stab can be erased. Only in pencil do I dare the blank page.

Michael O'Siadhail

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

Stephen King
 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

© 2025 Writing Studio


Academic Technology services: GIS | Media Center | Language Exchange

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑