Reading and Writing for Academic Success

When most people sit down to write something, either for a class, for fun, or for work, they dread it? Why? What about putting words on paper is so intimidating? One thing might be the judgment factor that is placed on most writing assignments in school.

The same can be said for reading. Somewhere along the way, we started to doubt our ability to read and comprehend well enough to complete assignments, to read for pleasure, to write about what we had read with confidence.

Reading and Writing for Academic Success to helps students see the integration of reading and writing—two parts of a whole. Mortimer Adler, a famous American philosopher and educator of the 20th century, wrote that reading and writing are like pitching and catching in a baseball game. The pitcher is the writer; the catcher is the reader. It’s an active process for both. They both must pay attention carefully to the decisions they make. They are in constant communication, back and forth, over and over, until the game is over.

Reading and Writing for Academic Success by Susan Ertel is an online course package that:

• helps students learn to manage their own writing process and evolve into a more confident writer who can tackle any writing assignment, whether it’s a single paragraph, a short essay, or a project for work.
• discusses strategies that will help students improve their reading skills. Reading and writing are fully integrated. As a writer, we are encoding information on the page for the reader to decode later. We must be purposeful as writers so our readers have a smooth trip through our paragraph, our essay, or our work project.
• presents the connections we need to make as readers and writers so we can improve our skills in both areas as we embark on our journey in higher education.
• promotes comprehension! As students move through the modules, they will see information repeated with the intent of reinforcing it in their brain. It might be worded a bit differently, or it might reference a previous module, and that is being done intentionally.