The Science of Writing

How do we marry science? Of reading to the science of writing. Doctor Graham? So I'm I'm glad that you posed that question because it's a great lead in from was what Karen and Young had to say. I think one way of thinking about this is that, you know, there's been so much emphasis on the science of reading one needs to kinda step back and say, is it really complete? And I think the answer to that is no because What it's done is it's left out the science of writing. We really should not be talking about in my opinion, the science of reading or the science of writing, we should be talking about the science of literacy. And it includes both of these skills. You know, basically, you kind of a simple way of thinking about this without writing, there's no reading. And a primary purpose of writing is to have people who read and they're connected in multiple ways. I mean, one of the ways that young, I think, they're a really good job of pointing out is they draw on the same cognitive mechanisms, the same knowledge and processes and those work interactively and dynamically across both reading and writing. Tim Shannonahan has said this really well. In terms of thinking about a shared knowledge of, reading and writing, you can think of your knowledge as a well, and we have a bucket for reading and a bucket for writing. Now, again, that kind of divides it up a little bit, but we're drawing out of that same well of knowledge and processes when we read and write. Now they're not always exactly the same. I'm not saying that reading and writing are identical processes. They're not but they draw upon the same cognitive resources. Another way of kinda thinking about this is a rhetorical relations view point of reading and writing. And with that, kind of viewpoint, you think about reading and you think about writing as being operations that are aimed at creating or understanding meaning. So they have a very similar purpose around constructing and understanding meaning. And so one of the ways of thinking about that in the classroom is that when you read something, and you think about what the author was trying to do, that can inform what you write. When you're writing, if you think about your audience, that can inform what you do because you have to take into account what they're likely to know about the topic, what things that, they don't know so that you make sure they cover them. And so it should influence your writing a great deal. And then a third way that we can think about this connection and taking advantage of it is a functional relationships model. And with that, reading and writing are not really these separate kinds of things. They're tasks or skills that we use to learn. You know, learning is built in our society within our schools around using reading to gather information using writing to think about it and using the two together to be more effective and better learners. So I think one of the things that we really need to do is start thinking about the the science of reading and writing or the science of literacy or as I would put it to science of writing and reading.