Molly Davidow

What struck me about the readings is the point that students need to know that authors make choices. Sometimes these choices are made to produce a dominant reading (which Rob Pope would like us to recognize and subvert), but also, authors make choices to make their writing more accessible to readers.

In “Engaging Ideas”, they discuss that novice readers have trouble adapting the strategies they use for different tasks. I’d add that the reader’s knowledge of text features: formatting, headings, subheadings, captions, pull-quotes, etc. tell much about the text’s content, but many students are not in the habit of noticing them.  I recently did an exercise with my students in which they had to identify author’s purpose for a variety of articles in a single newspaper.   I was struck by how many of them acted as if the text features–that could have made their assignment worlds easier, weren’t there.  For many of them, a text just exists.  They don’t think about choices made about what goes on a page to make it readable

Like Pope’s “Textual Intervention,” Salvatori and Donahue give students methods of “reading against the grain” in order to interpret an author’s choices in an (ostensibly) easy text.  When teaching a “difficult” text, my ultimate goal is usually to get my students immersed in the material, so that their comprehension isn’t hindered by foreign vocabulary, complex syntax, and which pronoun goes with which antecedent.  With reading against the grain, or interrupting a text we find ways to alienate ourselves from the text, because its “constructedness” is invisible.  This is the kind of thing I also try to balance in my classroom: making the structure visible in an “easy” text and the content accessible in another, more difficult one.

I often hear that we should urge students–especially struggling readers– to be meta-cognitive.  I liked that Salvatori and Donahue’s “The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty” gives more accessible language to engage students in this process.  By writing “difficulty papers” about literary works, the act of learning to read happens at the same time as (what students often see as) the more advanced work of interpreting a literary text. Too often, I think, the approach is to teach reading skills in isolation.