A new culture of learning

The training requirements for the modern professional are generated by a new culture of learning that is not exclusive to the environment of the formal educational system. Students encounter different sources of information that can sometimes cause fragmentation and distortion. At university, they need mechanisms and strategies that will allow them to organize, interpret and give meaning to the information, so that it will convert into an important element in the acquirement and production of knowledge.

Reading and writing as intellectual practices must be encouraged by university professors, who will legitimize the reading and writing processes in their students. If the university community claims to work for the construction of knowledge, they will admit the importance of reading and writing as social and discursive practices that affect the acquisition and retention of knowledge, as well as their implications. Therefore, they will also admit that the student faces characteristic types of discourses when going to university, so it is the obligation of the institution to ensure the necessary conditions for the student to approach this type of genres.

Types of discourse, according to Bajtín (1997), are relatively stable types of statements, specific for each area of language usage. The richness and diversity of genres is huge, since the possibilities of human activity are countless and because in practice there is a wide range of discursive genres that becomes more broad and that increases as it develops. At the same time, some of them tend to disappear, while others are born as a result of human activity.  

Editing your work

There is so much work that it goes beyond just adding or deleting some commas. You have to rewrite it.

You don’t understand why this is happening. Isn't writing easy? Reading is pretty easy; you just glide over the text. Why should writing be any different? I mean, you speak your language perfectly, and it shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Hundreds of questions are going through your head, and they get mixed with unkind feelings towards the editor. But, your work must go on and you have to find a way to do it. Demoralization should be left behind. How to do it?

Next time you’re in this situation, put yourself in the editor’s shoes and remember these things.

1.       Your text was only edited, no one is judging you. This is not school, and you’re not being graded. No one is interested in grading you, they only care about your text, and how it can get to be the best it can be for your readers.

2.      Direct comments are not rude. The editor is trying to be nice, but he can’t write a speech in each comment. The more direct the comment is, the better. This doesn’t mean the editor is being rude, it just means that he doesn’t want to waste your time, and he wants to make the reviewing process less exhausting.

3.       Know how to distinguish between rules, improvements and suggestions. The editor knows that some of the observations he makes should be followed to set your text in accordance with clear and unquestionable linguistic rules. There are other observations that are just improvements (what you wrote was correct, but this improves, clarifies or preserves the meaning better), and others are just suggestions (what you wrote is correct, but you would benefit from writing this or that). You won’t always agree, and sometimes you’ll have better solutions. Think about the comments, analyze them to see if there’s a better solution and negotiate.

4.       You shouldn’t get into a power struggle. The editor is not interested in becoming a dictator who must be obeyed at all times. The editor wants to help you improve your text, be it via the solution he suggests or with alternatives that deal with the issue raised in the comment.

5.       The editor is the specialist, not you. We tend to think that speaking our language is a universal skill, and that it grants us the authority to express ourselves without being corrected at all. This is false. You need to study to earn a degree in medicine, engineering or architecture, and you recognize these fields as specialties because of their competencies and particular knowledge. In that same way, you need to study your language, and you need to learn to use it as a malleable thing so that you can communicate... The editor is an expert in his field. Let him apply his knowledge and experience freely.

Reading and writing at university

Perceiving university as a place where students not only work with knowledge, but also have to transform it, it is important to consider the role of reading and writing in the achievement of this goal. In this respect, there are enough conclusions which show that students go to university without having managed, during elementary and secondary school, to develop discursive strategies that would allow them to dominate texts in general, not mentioning academic texts. This justifies the formulation of curricular proposals in which are taken into account variants (not only disciplinary, but especially epistemological, cognitional and cultural ones) that would ensure the acquirement of the processes of reading and writing, as a way to access knowledge and particularly as an essential fundament of the national and cultural identity.

Of course, we cannot deny that the forms and conditions of teaching reading and writing during previous levels of education can be inappropriate, but there is another aspect that we want to highlight: the fact that the ability of university students to read and write is strongly related to the forms of access to culture and its circulation, by the means of different traditional or technological and communicational supports and resources, and also to the difficulty in producing certain types of texts, specific for the university academic activity. Britto (1988) says on this topic: “we don’t mean to say that university students can’t read or write, but rather that they don’t use a certain form of discourse – academic discourse -, through which the university identifies itself and is identified by others.”

The university, being aware of this situation and understanding this skill as part of students’ university education, considers that it has to facilitate the interaction of the students with the practice of language characteristic for their field of study, with a specialized investigative activity and with the communication of the information inherent to their professional area, so that the student will get integrated in a certain academic community.

What is a text?

A text is a communicative and discursive event, as the unity of discourse stands in the elements that are organized and inter-connected, in an explicit or implicit way. This organization and inter-relationships forms the structure of the discourse, which in turn creates its object: the text. Thus, textualization is the process of expressing in words – in either spoken or written form – the mental contents manifested through organized thought, in which the text is displayed spatially and temporally, in sequences of phrases arranged in a relation of continuity.

On the subject of textual linguistics, Beaugrande and Dressler (1997), cited by  Ordóñez (2006:25-26) claim that: “a text is not a great amount of words, or a super-long sentence consisting of logical, well-arranged utterances, nor is it a set of grammar rules. What really makes a text is its communicative significance, for which it must fulfill seven inter-related textual norms – two of them are inherent to the text (cohesion and coherence), while five others are related to context (intentionality, acceptability, informativeness, situation and intertextuality) – and three regulatory principles of communication (efficacy, effectiveness and appropriateness).

A new direction and approach

A new direction and approach on reading and writing is to do it in large groups. This shows a processes and practices have the purpose to make it possible for the reader and writer to colonize their culture intellectually and develop in themselves the ability to see  knowledge as fields that can be reconfigured and which require a flexible subject, able to assimilate the permanently changing structures. Consequently, we can say that reading and writing have become, in the contemporaneous world, a task that requires more liberty, more competence, because the world and, implicitly, knowledge, are less linear, but wider and more intricate.

The fields of reading and writing have been extended, so that now we can read texts related to different areas – these are discourses, understood as texts about everything around us that makes sense and can be communicated in various ways. The discourse is a paradigm of significates with which we build, name and perceive the material and spiritual world. On the other hand, Casamiglia and Tusón (1999) state that talking about discourse means, above all things, talking about a social practice that starts from a contextualized use of language, either oral or written. Therefore, the discourse is part of the social life and sometimes is in itself an instrument that creates social life.

Van Dijk (1996) tries to explain the concept, identifying the three main dimensions of the discourse: the use of language, the communication of beliefs (cognition) and the interaction of social characters. Basically, one could say that a discourse is language at work. It is an individual, but also a social process. Discourse doesn’t appear only when somebody speaks or writes, but there is a discourse in all human activities. There is a discourse before the first word is uttered. Discourse is not just an instrument of language, but it is also a generator of knowledge and of meaning. The text is a concrete form of discourse, or we can say that a discourse is a text put in context.

Modern reading and writing

In the socio-historical context of the modern age, different theoretical and methodological concepts about reading and writing have been formulated, as well as various social, technological and academic uses. Nowadays, as Ferreiro (2005:13) states: “Reading and writing don’t have a unique definition, but they are verbs that refer to social structures, to activities defined from a social point of view.” The relationship of men and women with writing hasn’t always been the same: it was built throughout history. Reading didn’t and won’t have the same meaning in the 12th and the 21st century. We are witnessing the apparition of new ways of reading and new methods of writing, born from the new points of view, from hermeneutical perspectives, whose intentions are to explore texts and discourses.

In respect to these ideas, UNESCO and CEPAL state that “Cultural codes of modernity are usually defined as the skills required by the modern citizen for handling arithmetic, as well as reading and comprehension of written text; written communication; observation, description and critical analysis of the environment; receiving and interpreting messages of modern media; and participation in the design and implementation of group work.” (Cerro Robles, 1995)

The effort to practice the processes of reading and writing of texts and discourses helps expand and enhance the area of work, approaching these processes from a social, cognitive, discursive and interactive perspective, which requires understanding that discourses are, more than anything, social practices that cross with dialectical relations between particular discursive events, situations of communication in given contexts, powerful social actors and structures. 

Writing and reading approach

Bereiter and Scardamalia (1992) (cited by Hurtado and others, 2005) match a great writing and reading approach and identify two models of composition: on the one hand, reproducing the knowledge, and on the other hand, transforming the knowledge. In the second model, the authors consider that the writer starts from some previous mental representations, constructed in the moment when he takes up the task of writing, sets his objectives, organizes a writing plan and reflects on its development. Also, this model of writing is perceived from the point of view of problem solving, since at the time he produces the text, the writer must make certain decisions in regard to two aspects that offer multiple options: one of these is content, which refers to “what”, and the other is rhetoric, which refers to “how”.

The Spanish Minister of National Education (1998) also mentions the double condition of writing, as a process both individual and social: “This is not only about the coding of the significates by the means of linguistic rules. It is about a process that can be individual or social, through which a whole world is created, and in which are involved abilities, knowledge, interests. Sometimes, this process can be defining for a sociocultural and pragmatic context that determines the act of writing: writing means creating the world.”