By Amy Doty
“What happens when readers are also writers?
And how does reading inform writing?”
Text mining is a metaphor used by Stuart Greene, in Mining Texts in Reading to Write, to describe how writers read with purpose and intention to gather and develop knowledge they can use to accomplish their writing goals. It is composed of three mining strategies: constructing context, inferring or imposing structure, and seeing choices in language. Writers use these strategies to “excavate” what is needed from texts in order for them to develop their own set of tools to employ when composing across a variety of situations and disciplines.
Greene emphasizes the distinction between mining texts and traditional ‘reading like a writer’ or close reading strategies by pointing out that this process encourages students to move beyond observation and imitation to critically analyzing the choices and decisions made by authors across different social situations, thus empowering them to make their own authorial decisions. Greene assumes that our ultimate goal as educators is to help students take control over their own learning and suggests that we can do this by “helping students develop a knowledge of what mining texts means, when to employ these strategies, and how to manage these strategies in order to direct their own reading-writing process.”
3 Strategies for Mining the Text
Reconstructing Context
Students develop a set of tools to help them locate the context or situation that shapes the production of a text.
- Analyze discourse features to show how writers in a discipline invoke context by establishing the importance of an issue
- Use comparative analysis of multiple texts to promote the ongoing process of reading, analyzing, and authoring that recognizes the social nature of discourse across a variety of disciplines
- Encourage students to make judgements about the most appropriate way to make their own contribution in writing, using different strategies in different contextual situations
- Writers should provide a rationale for their context choices (ex: why I chose to introduce background information when writing my argument)
Inferring or Imposing Structure
Students identify the rhetorical structure that influences the way readers interpret a text.
- Analyze structure by linking it to the ways of knowing in a particular discipline (ex: the report form structured after the scientific method for science writing)
- Structure has a fluid nature whereby both readers and writers construct meaning, so students should analyze how a writer structures their ideas and the relationship between ordering principles and rhetorical purpose
- Readers actively construct meaning and create structure in light of their goals as readers and the prior knowledge they bring to a text which provides a framework for comprehending discourse
- Students should describe the organizational pattern of essays to demonstrate an awareness of why they approached issues the way that they did and evaluate their patterns of development based on their purposes for writing
Seeing Choices in Language
Students determine the kind of language that is appropriate to a given rhetorical situation.
- Focus on choices about language and why certain words or phrases might be appropriate or not in both source texts and student’s texts
- Students can reconstruct the choices and decisions made about language and content in light of the author’s goals and their own
- Emphasize the importance of developing an awareness of knowing both what students want to say and why certain details and ideas may or may not be appropriate for their goals
Practical Application in the Classroom
- Annotation helps students attend to the specific features of the texts they read, selecting, organizing, and connecting ideas for the purpose of writing
- Reading Logs that include information about how authors in different fields invoke context, structure meaning, and situate themselves linguistically
- Discussions within their reading/writing community give students the additional purpose during reading of knowing that they will be entering a conversation to demonstrate their knowledge of issues and to add a novel perspective
- Think Aloud activities go beyond critically observing other authors’ texts to taking on an authorial stance by challenging the text, consulting their own experience, and reflecting on students’ own goals as a writer (moving from a spectator to a participant role)
- Creating Purpose and Goals for text mining can be encouraged by informing students of the kind of writing they will be asked to do before they read texts, so they can draw upon their reading of other texts and evaluate contextual, structural, and linguistic choices while reading
- Writing Plans give students an opportunity to shift their focus from the rhetorical plans of other authors to developing their own plans for writing by evaluating information from the source text or prior experiences and reflecting on their different options as they compose a reading in their role as authors
- Reflective Writing after students re-read their own texts to consider the choices they made and the goals they set as writers and their effectiveness
Amy Doty is a Developmental English instructor at Southeast Community College in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her current research interests include best practices in online developmental pedagogy and the benefits of embedding executive function/non-cognitive and success coaching into classroom teaching to impact student retention and success. She enjoys building themed courses for first-year students that provide opportunities for them to engage in inquiry and project-based learning with a focus on exploring social issues and civil discourse to promote change through writing.
You can contact Amy at adoty@southeast.edu
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