I love to read. Mostly I read novels: realistic fiction and historical fictiion are my top two favorite genres and I tend to read multiple books by the same author. Joyce Carole Oates is one of my favorites, and most recently I've been into New York Times Best-Sellers, introduced to me by my sister who told me I had to read Gonegirl by Gillian Flynn. I read it in a bout 22 hours. I then quickly read Flynn's other book Dark Places. Because of my love of reading and habit to read multiple books by the same author, I think I am adept at recognizing SOME aspects of author's craft when I am reading traditional texts. I would say ideas, organization, voice, word choice, and sentence fluency are among the elements of craft that Tomkins (2012) cites that I cannot help but notice and pay attention to as I read. I think this is because certain author's tend to use the same words in multiple books: the one that jumps to my mind right now is J.C. Oates, she uses "myopic" to describe many of her characters across books. The first time I came across this word I had to look it up, I knew it had something to do with glasses based on the context, but I wanted the exact meaning and I found it menat someone who was short sighted. After reading several of her books, I found her using the word often. Same goes with the word "gossamer," but I found this word to frequent among the genre of Horror. So, these are only examples of word choice, but it goes for the other elements too, if you are an avid reader, elements of craft seem to jump out at you.
As far as digital texts, I think I recognize the presentation aspect and media aspect of an author's craft beyond what I would notice in a traditional text. Certain websites and web-texts appeal to me more than others due to their layout, accessibility, color/font, and so on. Sometimes as I am reading something online I say to myself "why would they do it this way?" or "I like the way this is done," so I do think I recognize some aspects even among digital texts.
As far as writing, I probably struggle with organization the most. what's funny, is that my reading and writing are not similar. I read fiction, I write non-fiction: essays mostly, emails, rationales for unit plans, so I am much less skilled as a writer when it comes to author's craft than I am as a reader and recognizing it.
Ever since I read Hicks' (2013) and Tompkins's (2012) chapters on author's craft I have been contemplating how I will address it in my own classroom. I think much of craft comes in the pre-writing stage and revising stage, so I would begin by spending much more time teaching those and allowing students to make changes to affect voice/word choice/play with sentence structure/and different organizational patterns and structures. These are areas where in the past I never spent much time on, as far as revising, I would do a quick peer edit sheet, or I would edit it, but I never stressed making big chnages that would alter a pieces meaning and allow the student to see author's craft in action.
Casey, I really appreciate your point about attending to author's craft most explicitly during prewriting and revising. I agree with you completely. Obviously, when the student is publishing, he or she would want to also conduct a final "review" of how well he/she used craft elements.... BUT! Have a clear understanding of the context for writing before drafting is key. This includes having some awareness of and appreciation for the genre he or she believes is the best fit for the task.
ReplyDeleteI would love to see how you might improve a checklist or what type of mini-lesson you might design and deliver at those prewriting and revisions stages to help aid your students' efforts.