Modeling a Writer's Identity: Reading and Imitation in the Writing Classroom

Abstract

(especially the reading of literature) has often been justified in the writing classroom because reading gives students something to imitate (see, for example, Miller's Composition and Decomposition and Comley and Scholes's Literature, Composition, and the Structure of English). The text, it is argued, provides a model of effective writing which students can copy, and the process of reading critically, practiced on literature, can become a model of how writers should behave in reading their own work. is thus seen as useful because it models both forms and processes for writers to imitate. But is this kind of imitation how writers really learn to write? Or does imitation in learning actually work some other way? In this article, I'll suggest an alternative understanding of imitation and reading in the writing classroom, and I'll exemplify this alternative using material from a semester-long participant-observation study of a freshman Composition and Reading course. The alternative runs as follows: when a student (or any writer) successfully learns something about writing by imitation, it is by imitating another person, and not a text or a process. Writers learn to write by imitating other writers, by trying to act like writers they respect. The forms, the processes, the texts