Reading, Writing, and Digitizing

Reviews / Votes

"Reading, Writing, and Digitizing takes the notion of critical literacy to a new level. Synthesizing new studies on expert and novice readers with research from across a variety of disciplines, the book sets forth a theory of reading, writing, and digitizing as fully articulated processes of making meaning. Horning introduces a rich conceptual vocabulary for thinking about how meta-awarenesses, skills, cognitive processes, and social contexts interact in the interpretation and writing of texts. As an added bonus, she includes concrete ideas to facilitate students' development as readers and writers."- Cynthia R. Haller, PhD, Associate Professor of English, York College, City University of New York, USA"Linguist and rhetorician Alice Horning begins her new book with the widespread recognition that when it comes to reading, students 'don't, won't, can't.' Reading problems urgently need addressing in a positive, specific, and immediately helpful way. Horning charts a course by which student novices can learn to be 'meta-readers.' Meta-readers, she claims, are able to 'go before and after, into and around, beyond and beside written text to understand and create meaning' (Introduction, p. 2). Moving between scholarship and analysis of expert readers and emergent academic readers, Horning demonstrates the process by which students grow and change as readers and writers. It is a valuable addition to an educator's bookshelf."- Catherine Haar, PhD, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA"Alice Horning's lucid, comprehensive discussion in Reading, Writing, and Digitizing: Understanding Literacy in the Electronic Age is for any teacher or scholar who seeks to understand how similar are the cognitive processes of reading from, and writing for, the Web/Internet. Arguing cogently from a psycholinguistic perspective that the making of meaning changes not one bit when someone confronts a print or digitized source, Alice Horning has convinced me, as she will myriad others, that literacy is literacy (and higher literacy is higher literacy) no matter what the medium of delivery. Horning's final chapter is among my favorites: it's filled with 'Monday morning' suggestions for ways teachers can gain insight into Horning's ideas so that ultimately it is our students who benefit."- Lynn Quitman Troyka, PhD, Senior Research Associate, Queensborough Community College, City University of New York, USA