One cannot teach writing without addressing reading as well. They are two sides of the same coin. Therefore, key readings are a focus of all of my freshman composition courses. In addition to the goal of creating critical thinking skills in students, facility in producing reader-based prose is the central goal of writing instruction. Some theorists think that in achieving one, the student moves toward achievement of the other.
Writing is created for a reader.
Therefore, up to a point, thoughtful, purposeful interaction of writers and readers, is necessary to develop sophisticated and potent products. Manuscripts need to be drafted, responded to, revised for clarity and worthiness, edited for accuracy, adequate detail and the turn of the phrase, and proofread for standard punctuation and spelling. Learning to be content while implementing a multi-step approach to creating a product is a major hurdle for many novice writers. My introductory linguistics course focuses mainly on broad-sweeping findings on the characteristics of human languages in the areas of sound, word structure, sentence structure, and meaning. Half of the examples in the introductory class are from English, the first language for most of the students.