Reading and writing have a reciprocal relationship, and a key recommendation from the EEF’s Improving Secondary Literacy guidance report is that we ‘combine writing instruction with reading in every subject’.
Often, this can manifest as reading then writing. But we should also look for opportunities to use writing as a way to improve reading. This can happen before, during and after.
Writing can help us prepare for reading, make notes as we do it, and provides a purpose that enhances our understanding of a text.
Writing helps us comprehend texts
According to Graham and Herbert (2011) writing about text should facilitate comprehension in five ways:
- It fosters explicitness, as the writer must select which information in text is most important.
- It is integrative, as it encourages the writer to organize ideas from text into a coherent whole, establishing explicit relationships among the ideas.
- It facilitates reflection, as the permanence of writing makes it easier to review, reexamine, connect, critique, and construct new understandings of text ideas.
- It can foster a personal involvement with text, as it requires active decision making about what will be written and how it will be treated.
- It involves transforming or manipulating the language of text so that writers put ideas into their own words, making them think about what the ideas mean.
