|
Strategies for Teaching
with Online Tools
|
|
|
Reading for Flow
Activity
As you write, your mind makes connections, and you record these as sentences. The associations you make, whether logically, intuitive, emotional, empathetic, can be crystal clear to you but obscure for your reader. The writing may flow for you, but be a series of stops and starts, wrong turns and dead-ends for your reader.
Unlike life, where you sometimes go with the flow, flow in writing is not something you go with, it is something you create so that your readers can follow your thinking. Flow, the ability of a reader to move from one word to another, from one sentence to another, from one paragraph to another, and from one page to another, is sometimes hard for a writer to gauge, and that's where a good outside reader helps.
Here's how they can help.
- Read the essay slowly, don't rush through it, and any place where you feel a twinge of doubt, or where you have to read twice, or where you aren't sure what something means, make a mark on the page. This can be between words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs.
- Read the essay carefully, thinking about what the writer is trying to say. Do not just read for the gist of things, but read for the specifics. Read one sentence at a time, and in your mind try to put it into your own words--are you clear on everything the writer means in that sentence? As you read, does the next sentence form a logical progression? Or does it seem to be a another item in a list? You can test for this by moving sentences around within a paragraph. If you can move sentences around and their order does not make any difference to the paragraph's meaning, or if you can move paragraphs around and their order does not make any difference to the paper's meaning, then those are good signs that the writing needs some organization to make flow relevant.
- Sometimes as you are reading you will notice a passage where the sentences or paragraphs are in a good order, but where there seem to be gaps in going from one to another. Generally there are two types of gaps, those caused by missing transitions and those caused by leaps of logic.
- A leap of logic usually occurs because a writer's brain works fast, and they make a connection that is clear in their mind, but which you cannot follow. You can explain to the writer where things break down for you and what kind of information you need.
- A missing transition could be as small as a sentence needing a simple word such as however to indicate that it is offering an other point to consider that differs from a point made in the previous sentence, or perhaps a phrase such as as stated earlier to signal to readers that a point made earlier is being recalled.
- What you need to do when you read for flow, can be boiled down to two things:
1. Indicate where you see a breakdown in the writing's flow.
2. Offer the writer either an explanation for the breakdown--noting why you experienced it in your reading, or offer the writer a fix--a suggested revision that would have made the reading smoother for you.
The Benefits
Flow disruptions can be caused by so many things, from the smallest misuse of punctuation to something as large as needing to rethink and reorder the whole paper. A good reader can you help you with flow by identifying for you the places where they have to stop reading because they are lost, momentarily confused, or unsure of your intent. If a reader follows up on this by explaining exactly what caused the problem, describing to you in a conference what their reading experience was in a sentence, paragraph, page or whole paper, you can use that insight to revise. Asking a reader to say or write down for you what might have cleared things up, offers you an option, a way to think outside your own point of view and from a reader's point of view instead. When a reader offers these suggestions, they offer you a glimpse of how their mind works, and if you know a bit about that, you can revise accordingly.
Using this Activity to Revise
As you can guess by now, the best thing about having someone read for flow and then describing where things broke down for you, followed by a suggestion or description of what they needed or would have like to have seen in the writing so that things read more smoothly for them, is that you get an insight into how your writing appears to an outside mind.
What you need to do as a writer is to think carefully about the advice, consider it, and use it guide your revision. Not all flow problems stem from writing. Sometimes, for example, you will use jargon or make reference to something others in your audience will know but that your reader may not. Conversely, sometimes a reader will know the same things as you, and will not be able to detect a flow breakdown because they share many of the same references. This can often happen when you've written something based on a class reading or discussion. So one of the best ways to get reading for flow is to ask someone in your class and someone else outside your class to read for flow. Then, use the combined feedback to make your revising choices.