Strengthening the Reading-Writing Connection

“Mrs. Essenburg, is this dialogue, like we were talking about?” 

A 6th grader beckoned to me in the midst of a classroom of heads quietly bent over independent reading books. It took me a moment to recognize what her confusion was. Then I realized the novel she held was an edition printed in England, so the convention for dialogue was to use single quotation marks rather than double. 

Then she pointed to a particular line, “What does this mean?” The line of dialogue started with “I’m,” so what it looked like on the page was this: ‘I’. I can see why that would be confusing: a single quotation mark, a capital letter I, and an apostrophe. Why would a first person singular pronoun be enclosed in single quotation marks--something she’d never heard of before. We had a little whispered conversation right there about all those conventions. It’s a confusion I never would have thought to address, so I’m glad we’d been focusing on dialogue in class, resulting in the student being aware enough to identify her confusion (and bold enough to initiate the discussion). 

We started by noticing the dialogue when we read “Funeral,” an excerpt from Ralph Fletcher’s memoir. We inferred the rules for formatting, capitalization, and punctuation from what we saw: 
     “A funeral!” I laughed. “Hey, I’m moving. I’m not dead!”
     “You’ll be dead to us,” Larry pointed out. 

We wrote our own character sketches which had to include dialogue. When revising and again when editing, I put two lines of dialogue from “Thank You, Ma’am” by Langston Hughes on the whiteboard, reviewed the guidelines we’d noticed, and asked students to check all their dialogue to be sure they’d applied the guidelines:
     Firmly gripped by his shirt front, the boy said, “Yes’m.” 
     “If I turn you loose, will you run?” asked the woman. 


One of my professional development goals for this summer is to re-read Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop and make a plan for intentionally integrating this kind of reading-writing connection throughout the 6th and 7th grade ELA curriculum.

We know that grammar and rules instruction not embedded in reading and writing produce limited or even negative improvement in writing (Constance Weaver, Teaching Grammar in Context). We also know that there is a correlation between wide reading and sophisticated writing (Stephen Krashen, Free Voluntary Reading). My goal is to make the transfer even more efficient by raising students’ awareness that reading is watching professional writers at work so we can improve our own craft.