Search -
Connections: Reading, Writing, and Thinking
Connections Reading Writing and Thinking Author:Robert Diyanni, Robert Diyanni This text's premise is that all learning results from linking new information and experience with what we've previously learned and, in the process, readjusting our understanding of what we know as we come to know more.Connections provides ways for students to perceive the validity and pre-eminence of their own experience in the formal learning ... more »process.The reading and writing questions and exercises invite students to do things, rather than simply to let things be done to them. They're urged to become active respondents in dialogues with the text, with one another, and with themselves. The headnotes and exercises are designed to stimulate students to observe, infer, connect, and conclude. In doing so, they become more adept at making sense of what they read and making sense in what they write.Connections is not a reader, an anthology, or a rhetoric-handbook, although it shares features with all of these. It is, instead, an invention-centered, response-oriented reading, writing, and thinking book that stresses the often-ignored truth that reading, writing, and thinking are not separable skills-are not "skills" at all in the textbook meaning of that word-but activities of mind that must be considered together.Major divisions: Part I-invention exercises, discovery procedures, thinking games designed to introduce students to the process of how they make meaning; Part II-sets of reading, with students guided to possible connections between them by headnotes, discussion materials, composing exercises; Part III-exercises and guidelines for style, with analysis and imitation as central features; Part IV-a potpourri of readings, including essays, poems, and letters, through which students are invited to make the kinds of multiple connections that bring surprising insights and repeated pleasure.« less