relationship with reading essay

The Power of Literacy Narratives

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Ed.M., Harvard University Graduate School of Education
B.A., Kalamazoo College

I first learned to read at the age of three while sitting on my grandmother’s lap in her high-rise apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, IL. While flipping casually through Time magazine, she noticed how I took a keen interest in the blur of black and white shapes on the page. Soon, I was following her wrinkled finger from one word to the next, sounding them out, until those words came into focus, and I could read. It felt as though I had unlocked time itself.

What Is a “Literacy Narrative?”

What are your strongest memories of reading and writing? These stories, otherwise known as “literacy narratives,” allow writers to talk through and discover their relationships with reading, writing, and speaking in all its forms. Narrowing in on specific moments reveals the significance of literacy’s impact on our lives, conjuring up buried emotions tied to the power of language, communication, and expression.

To be “ literate ” implies the ability to decode language on its most basic terms, but literacy also expands to one’s ability to "read and write" the world — to find and make meaning out of our relationships with texts, ourselves, and the world around us. At any given moment, we orbit language worlds. Soccer players, for example, learn the language of the game. Doctors talk in technical medical terms. Fishermen speak the sounds of the sea. And in each of these worlds, our literacy in these specific languages allows us to navigate, participate and contribute to the depth of knowledge generated within them.

Famous writers like Annie Dillard, author of "The Writing Life," and Anne Lammot, "Bird by Bird," have penned literacy narratives to reveal the highs and lows of language learning, literacies, and the written word. But you don’t have to be famous to tell your own literacy narrative — everyone has their own story to tell about their relationships with reading and writing. In fact, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a publicly accessible archive of personal literacy narratives in multiple formats featuring over 6,000 entries. Each shows the range of subjects, themes, and ways into the literacy narrative process as well as variations in terms of voice, tone, and style.

How to Write Your Own Literacy Narrative

Ready to write your own literacy narrative but don’t know where to begin?

Think of a story linked to your personal history of reading and writing. Perhaps you want to write about your favorite author or book and its impact on your life. Maybe you remember your first brush with the sublime power of poetry. Do you remember the time you first learned to read, write or speak in another language? Or maybe the story of your first big writing project comes to mind. Make sure to consider why this particular story is the most important one to tell. Usually, there are powerful lessons and revelations uncovered in the telling of a literacy narrative.
Wherever you begin, picture the first scene that comes to mind in relation to this story, using descriptive details. Tell us where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing in this specific moment when your literacy narrative begins. For example, a story about your favorite book may begin with a description of where you were when the book first landed in your hands. If you’re writing about your discovery of poetry, tell us exactly where you were when you first felt that spark. Do you remember where you were when you first learned a new word in a second language?
Continue from there to explore the ways in which this experience had meaning for you. What other memories are triggered in the telling of this first scene? Where did this experience lead you in your writing and reading journey? To what extent did it transform you or your ideas about the world? What challenges did you face in the process? How did this particular literacy narrative shape your life story? How do questions of power or knowledge come into play in your literacy narrative?

Writing Toward a Shared Humanity

Writing literacy narratives can be a joyful process, but it can also trigger untapped feelings about the complexities of literacy. Many of us carry scars and wounds from early literacy experiences. Writing it down can help us explore and reconcile these feelings in order to strengthen our relationship with reading and writing. Writing literacy narratives can also help us learn about ourselves as consumers and producers of words, revealing the intricacies of knowledge, culture, and power bound up in language and literacies. Ultimately, telling our literacy stories brings us closer to ourselves and each other in our collective desire to express and communicate a shared humanity.

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein is a poet, writer, and educator from Chicago, IL (USA) who currently splits her time in East Africa. Her essays on arts, culture, and education appear in Teaching Artist Journal, Art in the Public Interest, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Teaching Tolerance, The Equity Collective, AramcoWorld, Selamta, The Forward, among others.

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1.2: Why Read and Write About Literature?

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Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

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Why Read Literature?

In the age of memes, Twitter, Youtube, and streaming television services, literature might seem like a relic of the past. Indeed, fewer people are reading literature than ever. According to an article published in the Washington Post, "in 2015, 43 percent of adults read at least one work of literature in the previous year. That's the lowest percentage in any year since NEA surveys began tracking r eading and arts participation in 1982 when the literature reading rate was 57 percent" (Ingraham). If the decline of literature-reading in adults isn't the death knoll of literature, the decline in teenagers might be. According to NPR, in a recently conducted poll, "nearly half of 17-year-olds say they read for pleasure no more than one or two times a year — if that" ( Ludden). How many books have you read this year? How many poems? Indeed, in a world of Netflix and TikTok, it is difficult for stinky old books to compete.

But this is hardly a new problem if it is even a problem at all.

Consider the words of master-of-clapbacks Sir Philip Sydney, #throwback to the late 1500s and early 1600s. After the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, many people saw the proliferation of novels and plays as morally poisonous. Talking heads of the time argued that poetry and literature were a waste of time, or "fake news" as some might call it today. They questioned the purpose of fictional works. Poet and diplomat Sir Philip Sydney responded with a scathing literary smack-down to the haters. He argued the poet has a special talent to create new, beautiful worlds that no other professional can claim, and that those who question the purpose of poetry have "earth-creeping" minds and are "momes" (AKA fools, blockheads). He further stated that he hopes these momes never get "favor" (love) because they don't know how to write sonnets to woo their love interests and that they don't get an epitaph on their graves, because that is the poet's job. Ouch, harsh.

In today's world, it seems that Sidney would probably consider most people momes. After all, very few of us read or appreciate poetry regularly. Most of our reading and writing is done on the internet: in the forms of Facebook posts, memes, tweets, snapchats, Tik Tok videos, and viral news. In response to this trend, many famous authors and literary critics have stated that literature is dead (Breuklander). Indeed, if we define literature as only printed novels and poetry, perhaps it is, for all intents and purposes, dead. But... what if we were to define literature as Sidney did--a creation made from the "zodiac of [the poet's] own wit," improving upon nature itself through invention? Might some of today's internet media fall into that definition?

What if literature isn't dead after all...but thriving more than ever? What if we radically reconsider the parameters of literature? What if literature has just evolved from sonnets and novels to tweets and memes? In this textbook, we will explore how technology has blurred the lines between Literature and literature. We will question and explore the "usefulness" of literature in a world that encourages split-second attention spans. We will see how literature has solved problems in the past, and explore how it can be used to solve problems in the future. Medicine, a threat to the status quo, entertainment, activism, or boring stinky old piles of pages: what is literature to you?

No matter the reader, no matter the writer, no matter the genre, literature is a cultural relic, a manifestation of the human experience. Thus, it can teach us things about our society and about ourselves we might not be able to learn from other types of media. It enables us to experience and discuss ideas from the safety of our armchairs, to project ourselves onto characters and environments, to explore worlds and lived experiences we otherwise would never have the opportunity to experience.

Additionally, data suggests reading literature benefits us in profound ways.

Benefits of Literature

Studies show reading literature may help

promote empathy and social skills (Castano and Kidd)
alleviate symptoms of depression (Billington et al.)
business leaders succeed (Coleman)
prevent dementia by stimulating the mind (Thorpe)

These are just a few of the studied benefits of literature. As we continue to gain increasing complexity in terms of measuring brain activity and developing other tools to measure brain function, scientists may find more benefits.

Why Write About Literature?

You might be asking yourself why you should bother writing about something you've read. After all, isn't creative writing more fun, journalistic writing more interesting, and technical writing more useful? Maybe, but consider this: writing about literature will let you exercise your critical thinking skills like no other style of writing will. Even if you don't want to pursue a career involving literature, you can use critical thinking and analysis in any field from philosophy to business to physics. More than being able to think critically, you need to be able to express those thoughts in a coherent fashion. Writing about literature will allow you to practice this invaluable communication skill.

“Okay,” you say, “that's all good and well. But hasn't anything I have to say about a story already been said? So what's the point, then?” When you write your paper, you might end up saying something that has been discussed, argued over, or proposed by literary critics and students alike. However, when you write something, you present a point of view through your unique voice. Even if something has been said about a book many times, you can add something new to that discussion. Perhaps you can state an idea in simpler terms, or you want to disagree with a popular viewpoint. Even if you're writing to an instructor's prompt, your voice will make the paper unique.

How Do I Start?

To many of us, writing a response to something we've had to read sounds more than a little daunting. There are so many things to examine and analyze in a book, play, or poem. But before you decide that writing about writing just isn't for you, think about this--you already have many of the skills you need to write a good response to literature.

How many times have you heard about someone who watched a horror movie and yelled, “Don't go into the basement!” at the potential victim. Or maybe you've listened to a song and thought about how the lyrics described your life almost perfectly. Perhaps you like to jump up and cheer for your favorite team even if you're watching the game from home. Each time you do one of these things, you are responding to something you've seen or heard. And when you read a book, you likely do the same thing. Have you ever read anything and sympathized with or hated a character? If so, you've already taken your first step in responding to literature.

However, the next steps are a little harder. You need to be able to put your response into writing so other people can understand why you believe one thing or another about a book, play, or poem. In addition, writing an essay based on how a story makes you think or feel is only one of many ways to respond to what you read. In order to write a strong paper, you will need to examine a text both subjectively and objectively . If you only write about your personal reaction to a book, there won't be much to support your argument except your word alone. Thus, you will need to use some facts from the text to support your argument. Rather than trying to evaluate every nuance of a text all at once, you should start with the basics: character and plot. From there, you can examine the theme of the work and then move on to the finer points such as the writing itself. For instance, when determining how you want to analyze a piece of literature, you might want to ask yourself the following series of questions:

Who are the characters?
What are they doing?
Why and how are they doing it?
Do their actions relate to any broader topics or issues?
How does the author convey this through their writing?

Questions to consider when writing about literature

Of course, answering these questions will only start your analysis. However, if you can answer them, you will have a strong grasp of the basic elements of the story. From there, you can go on to more specific questions, such as, “How does symbolism help illustrate the theme?” or “What does the author say about the relationships between characters through the dialogue he gives them?” However, before you can start answering detailed questions like these, you should look at the basic elements of what you're reading. Some of the most common elements in a piece of literature include:

Plot (story or play) or structure (poem)
Symbolism and Figurative Language

As you work through each genre in this book, try to examine each of these elements in each piece of literature you read.

Optional, Supplemental Reading: Excerpt from Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy

"There is no art delivered unto mankind that has not the works of nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth. So doth the astronomer look upon the stars, and, by that he sees, set down what order nature has taken therein. So do the geometrician and arithmetician in their divers sorts of quantities. So doth the musician in times tell you which by nature agree, which not. The natural philosopher thereon has his name, and the moral philosopher stands upon the natural virtues, vices, and passions of man; and “follow nature,” says he, “therein, and thou shalt not err.” The lawyer says what men have determined, the historian what men have done. The grammarian speaks only of the rules of speech, and the rhetorician and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weighs the nature of man’s body, and the nature of things helpful or hurtful unto it. And the metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he, indeed, build upon the depth of nature.

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature brings forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goes hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden...

But if—fie of such a but!—you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry; if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry, or rather, by a certain rustical disdain, will become such a mome [blockhead—ed.], as to be a Momus of poetry; then, though I will not wish unto you the ass’ ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a poet’s verses, as Bubonax was, to hang himself; nor to be rimed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse. I must send you in the behalf of all poets:—that while you live in love, and never get favor for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph." -- Sir Philip Sydney

Works Cited

Billington, Josie, Dowrick, Christopher, Hamer, Andrew, Robinson, Jude and Clare Williams. An investigation into the therapeutic benefits of reading in relation to depression and well-being. Liverpool Health Inequalities Research Institute. University of Liverpool, Nov. 2010. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/iphs/web_version_therapeutic_benefits_of_reading_final_report_Mar.pdf

Breuklander, Joel. "Literature is Dead (According to Straight, White Guys at Least)." The Atlantic, 18 July 2013. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/literature-is-dead-according-to-straight-white-guys-at-least/277906/ Accessed 12 August 2018

Castano, Emanuele and David Kidd. "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind." Science. 18 Oct. 2013;342(6156):377-80.

Coleman, John. "The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals." Harvard Business Review, 2012. https://hbr.org/2012/11/the-benefits-of-poetry-for-pro

Ingraham, Christopher. "The long, steady decline of literary reading." The Washington Post, 7 Sep 2016. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/07/the-long-steady-decline-of-literary-reading/?utm_term=.ad2fa9146ec0 Accessed 2 August 2018.

Ludden, Jennifer. "Why Aren't Teens Reading Like They Used To?" NPR. 12 May 2014. https://www.npr.org/2014/05/12/311111701/why-arent-teens-reading-like-they-used-to Accessed 02 August 2018.

Thorpe, J.R. "Why Reading Poetry Is Good For Your Brain." Bustle , 20 Apr. 2017. https://www.bustle.com/p/why-reading-poetry-is-good-for-your-brain-51884

Sidney, Sir Philip. The Defense of Poesy. The Poetry Foundation. 13 Oct. 2009. Web. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69375/the-defence-of-poesy Accessed 2 August 2018.

Contributors and Attributions

Why Write About Literature sections adapted from "Writing About Literature Basics" from Commonsense Composition by Crystle Bruno of San Jose State University licensed CC BY-NC 4.0

Categories: Engaging with Courses , Strategies for Learning

Reading is one of the most important components of college learning, and yet it’s one we often take for granted. Of course, students who come to Harvard know how to read, but many are unaware that there are different ways to read and that the strategies they use while reading can greatly impact memory and comprehension. Furthermore, students may find themselves encountering kinds of texts they haven’t worked with before, like academic articles and books, archival material, and theoretical texts.

So how should you approach reading in this new environment? And how do you manage the quantity of reading you’re asked to cover in college?

Start by asking “Why am I reading this?”

To read effectively, it helps to read with a goal . This means understanding before you begin reading what you need to get out of that reading. Having a goal is useful because it helps you focus on relevant information and know when you’re done reading, whether your eyes have seen every word or not.

Some sample reading goals:

To find a paper topic or write a paper;
To have a comment for discussion;
To supplement ideas from lecture;
To understand a particular concept;
To memorize material for an exam;
To research for an assignment;
To enjoy the process (i.e., reading for pleasure!).

Your goals for reading are often developed in relation to your instructor’s goals in assigning the reading, but sometimes they will diverge. The point is to know what you want to get out of your reading and to make sure you’re approaching the text with that goal in mind. Write down your goal and use it to guide your reading process.

Next, ask yourself “How should I read this?”

Not every text you’re assigned in college should be read the same way. Depending on the type of reading you’re doing and your reading goal, you may find that different reading strategies are most supportive of your learning. Do you need to understand the main idea of your text? Or do you need to pay special attention to its language? Is there data you need to extract? Or are you reading to develop your own unique ideas?

The key is to choose a reading strategy that will help you achieve your reading goal. Factors to consider might be:

The timing of your reading (e.g., before vs. after class)
What type of text you are reading (e.g., an academic article vs. a novel)
How dense or unfamiliar a text is
How extensively you will be using the text
What type of critical thinking (if any) you are expected to bring to the reading

Based on your consideration of these factors, you may decide to skim the text or focus your attention on a particular portion of it. You also might choose to find resources that can assist you in understanding the text if it is particularly dense or unfamiliar. For textbooks, you might even use a reading strategy like SQ3R .

Finally, ask yourself “How long will I give this reading?”

Often, we decide how long we will read a text by estimating our reading speed and calculating an appropriate length of time based on it. But this can lead to long stretches of engaging ineffectually with texts and losing sight of our reading goals. These calculations can also be quite inaccurate, since our reading speed is often determined by the density and familiarity of texts, which varies across assignments.

For each text you are reading, ask yourself “based on my reading goal, how long does this reading deserve ?” Sometimes, your answer will be “This is a super important reading. So, it takes as long as it takes.” In that case, create a time estimate using your best guess for your reading speed. Add some extra time to your estimate as a buffer in case your calculation is a little off. You won’t be sad to finish your reading early, but you’ll struggle if you haven’t given yourself enough time.

For other readings, once we ask how long the text deserves, we will realize based on our other academic commitments and a text’s importance in the course that we can only afford to give a certain amount of time to it. In that case, you want to create a time limit for your reading. Try to come up with a time limit that is appropriate for your reading goal. For instance, let’s say I am working with an academic article. I need to discuss it in class, but I can only afford to give it thirty minutes of time because we’re reading several articles for that class. In this case, I will set an alarm for thirty minutes and spend that time understanding the thesis/hypothesis and looking through the research to look for something I’d like to discuss in class. In this case, I might not read every word of the article, but I will spend my time focusing on the most important parts of the text based on how I need to use it.

If you need additional guidance or support, reach out to the course instructor and the ARC.

If you find yourself struggling through the readings for a course, you can ask the course instructor for guidance. Some ways to ask for help are: “How would you recommend I go about approaching the reading for this course?” or “Is there a way for me to check whether I am getting what I should be out of the readings?”

If you are looking for more tips on how to read effectively and efficiently, book an appointment with an academic coach at the ARC to discuss your specific assignments and how you can best approach them!

SQ3R is a form of reading and note taking that is especially suited to working with textbooks and empirical research articles in the sciences and social sciences. It is designed to facilitate your reading process by drawing your attention to the material you don’t know, while building on the pre-existing knowledge you already have. It’s a great first step in any general study plan. Here are the basic components:

When using SQ3R, you don’t start by reading, but by “surveying” the text as a whole. What does that mean? Surveying involves looking at all the components of the text—like its subheadings, figures, review questions, etc.—to get a general sense of what the text is trying to achieve.

The next step of SQ3R still doesn’t involve reading! Now your job is to create questions around the material you noted in your survey. Make note of the things you already seem to understand even without reading, and then write out questions about the material that seems new or that you don’t fully understand. This list of questions will help guide your reading, allowing you to focus on what you need to learn about the topic. The goal is to be able to answer these questions by the end of your reading (and to use them for active study as well!).

Now that you’ve surveyed and questioned your text, it’s finally time to read! Read with an eye toward answering your questions, and highlight or make marginal notes to yourself to draw your attention to important parts of the text.

If you’ve read your text with an eye to your questions, you will now want to practice answering them out loud. You can also take notes on your answers. This will help you know what to focus on as you review.

As you study, look back at your questions. You might find it helpful to move those questions off the physical text. For example, when you put questions on flashcards, you make it hard to rely on memory cues embedded on the page and, thus, push yourself to depend on your own memory for the answer. (Of course, drawing from your memory is what you’ll need to do for the test!)

Seeing Textbooks in a New Light

Textbooks can be a fantastic supportive resource for your learning. They supplement the learning you’ll do in the classroom and can provide critical context for the material you cover there. In some courses, the textbook may even have been written by the professor to work in harmony with lectures.

There are a variety of ways in which professors use textbooks, so you need to assess critically how and when to read the textbook in each course you take.

Textbooks can provide:

A fresh voice through which to absorb material. For challenging concepts, they can offer new language and details that might fill in gaps in your understanding.
The chance to “preview” lecture material, priming your mind for the big ideas you’ll be exposed to in class.
The chance to review material, making sense of the finer points after class.
A resource that is accessible any time, whether it’s while you are studying for an exam, writing a paper, or completing a homework assignment.

Textbook reading is similar to and different from other kinds of reading . Some things to keep in mind as you experiment with its use:

The answer is “both” and “it depends.” In general, reading or at least previewing the assigned textbook material before lecture will help you pay attention in class and pull out the more important information from lecture, which also tends to make note-taking easier. If you read the textbook before class, then a quick review after lecture is useful for solidifying the information in memory, filling in details that you missed, and addressing gaps in your understanding. In addition, reading before and/or after class also depends on the material, your experience level with it, and the style of the text. It’s a good idea to experiment with when works best for you!

Just like other kinds of course reading, it is still important to read with a goal . Focus your reading goals on the particular section of the textbook that you are reading: Why is it important to the course I’m taking? What are the big takeaways? Also take note of any questions you may have that are still unresolved.

Reading linearly (left to right and top to bottom) does not always make the most sense. Try to gain a sense of the big ideas within the reading before you start: Survey for structure, ask Questions, and then Read – go back to flesh out the finer points within the most important and detail-rich sections.

Summarizing pushes you to identify the main points of the reading and articulate them succinctly in your own words, making it more likely that you will be able to retrieve this information later. To further strengthen your retrieval abilities, quiz yourself when you are done reading and summarizing. Quizzing yourself allows what you’ve read to enter your memory with more lasting potential, so you’ll be able to recall the information for exams or papers.

Marking Text

Marking text, which often involves making marginal notes, helps with reading comprehension by keeping you focused. It also helps you find important information when reviewing for an exam or preparing to write an essay. The next time you’re reading, write notes in the margins as you go or, if you prefer, make notes on a separate document.

Your marginal notes will vary depending on the type of reading. Some possible areas of focus:

What themes do you see in the reading that relate to class discussions?
What themes do you see in the reading that you have seen in other readings?
What questions does the reading raise in your mind?
What does the reading make you want to research more?
Where do you see contradictions within the reading or in relation to other readings for the course?
Can you connect themes or events to your own experiences?

Your notes don’t have to be long. You can just write two or three words to jog your memory. For example, if you notice that a book has a theme relating to friendship, you can just write, “pp. 52-53 Theme: Friendship.” If you need to remind yourself of the details later in the semester, you can re-read that part of the text more closely.

Reading Workshops

If you are looking for help with developing best practices and using strategies for some of the tips listed above, come to an ARC workshop on reading!

Reading Worksheets, Spelling, Grammar, Comprehension, Lesson Plans

The Relationship Between Reading and Writing

F or many years reading and writing were (and sometimes still are) taught separately. Though the two have almost always been taught by the same person (the English/Language Arts teacher) during the Language Arts period or block, educators rarely made explicit connections between the two for their students. Over the last ten years research has shown that reading and writing are more interdependent than we thought. The relationship between reading and writing is a bit like that of the chicken and egg. Which came first is not as important as the fact that without one the other cannot exist. A child’s literacy development is dependent on this interconnection between reading and writing.

Basically put: reading affects writing and writing affects reading. According to recommendations from the major English/Language Arts professional organizations, reading instruction is most effective when intertwined with writing instruction and vice versa. Research has found that when children read extensively they become better writers. Reading a variety of genres helps children learn text structures and language that they can then transfer to their own writing. In addition, reading provides young people with prior knowledge that they can use in their stories. One of the primary reasons that we read is to learn. Especially while we are still in school, a major portion of what we know comes from the texts we read. Since writing is the act of transmitting knowledge in print, we must have information to share before we can write it. Therefore reading plays a major role in writing.

At the same time practice in writing helps children build their reading skills. This is especially true for younger children who are working to develop phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Phonemic awareness (the understanding that words are developed from sound “chunks”) develops as children read and write new words. Similarly, phonics skills or the ability to link sounds together to construct words are reinforced when children read and write the same words. For older children practice in the process of writing their own texts helps them analyze the pieces that they read. They can apply their knowledge about the ways that they chose to use particular language, text structure or content to better understand a professional author’s construction of his or her texts.

Harnessing the Reading-Writing Relationship to Help Children Learn

Simply knowing that reading and writing are intimately connected processes isn’t enough. In order to help children develop these two essential skills, parents and teachers need to apply this knowledge when working with them. Here are a few strategies for using reading and writing to reinforce development of literacy skills.

Genre Study

One of the most effective ways to use the relationship between reading and writing to foster literacy development is by immersing children in a specific genre. Parents and teachers should identify a genre that is essential to a grade level’s curriculum or is of particular interest to a child or group of children. They should then study this genre with the child(ren) from the reading and writing perspectives. Children should read and discuss with adults high quality examples of works written in the genre focusing on its structure and language as well as other basic reading skills including phonics and comprehension. Once children have studied the genre to identify its essential elements, they should be given opportunities to write in the genre. As they are writing, adults should help them apply what they have learned from reading genre specific texts to guide their composition. This process should be recursive to allow children to repeatedly move between reading and writing in the genre. In the end children will not only have a solid and rich knowledge of the genre, but will also have strengthened their general reading and writing skills.

Reading to Develop Specific Writing Skills

Parents and teachers do not have to engage in an extensive genre study to foster their children’s reading and writing abilities. Texts can be used on limited basis to help children learn and strengthen specific writing skills. Parents and teachers should first identify writing skills that a particular child or group of children need support in developing. For example, many students in a seventh grade class might have difficulty writing attention getting introductions in their essays. One of the most effective ways to help children build specific writing skills is to show and discuss with them models that successfully demonstrate the skill. Adults should select a number of texts where the authors “nail” the area that they want to help their children grow in. For our sample seventh graders we’d want to find several pieces of writing with strong, engaging introductions and read and analyze these with the students. Once children have explored effective models of the skill, they should be given opportunities to practice it. They can either write new pieces or revise previous pieces of writing emulating the authors’ techniques.

Integrating “Sound” Instruction in Reading and Writing

Phonemic awareness and phonics are two of the pillars of reading. Without understanding the connection between sounds and letters, a person cannot read. The connection between reading and writing can help solidify these skills in young readers. Parents and teachers should help children “sound out” words in both their reading and writing. When a child comes to a word in their reading that is unfamiliar, the adult(s) working with her can model or guide her in sounding out the word using knowledge of phonemes (sound “chunks”). Similarly, if a child wants to write a new word the adult(s) can use the same technique to help her choose which letters to write. If the child is younger, accurate spelling is not as important as an understanding of the connection between particular sounds and letters. Therefore helping the child pick letters that approximate the spelling is more appropriate than providing him with the actual spelling. If the child is older and has an understanding of some of the unique variations in the English language (such as silent “e”), the parent or teacher should encourage him to use that knowledge to come up with the spelling of the word.

Choice in Reading and Writing

Another effective method for using the relationship between reading and writing to foster literacy development is simply giving children the choice in their reading and writing experiences. We learn best when we are motivated. If children are always told exactly what to read and what to write, they will eventually either come to see reading and writing as impersonal events or will “shut down”. Often in classrooms, teachers allow children to select their own books to read during independent reading time, but they rarely give them the opportunity to pick their own writing topics. In order to encourage ownership over their reading and writing, children should be given chances to read and write what is interesting and important to them.

Talk About It!

While it may seem like common sense to adults that reading and writing have a lot to do with each other, the connection is not always as apparent to young people. Parents and teachers should explain how the two skills reinforce and strengthen each other. Young people (especially adolescents) often ask their parents and teachers, “Why do I have to learn this?” Here is a perfect opportunity to show the relationship between two essential academic and life skills.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Experience — Reading And Writing Over My Younger Years: My Personal Narrative

Reading and Writing Over My Younger Years: My Personal Narrative

Categories: Literacy Personal Experience

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Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 844 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited:

Carson, D. A. (1999). The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism. Zondervan.
Chow, I. (2018). My journey through the valley of the shadow of death. The Daily Californian.
C.S. Lewis. (2002). Mere Christianity. HarperCollins.
Keller, T. (2008). The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Dutton.
McDowell, J. (2017). More Than a Carpenter. Tyndale House Publishers.
Moreland, J. P. (2014). The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters. Moody Publishers.
Nabeel Qureshi. (2014). Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity. Zondervan.
Piper, J. (2006). Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Multnomah.
Rookmaaker, H. (1970). Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. Crossway.
Schaeffer, F. (2008). The God Who Is There. IVP Books.

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Blast from the Past: How Can We Take Advantage of the Reading-Writing Relationship?

This blog first appeared on February 22, 2020. It has been a while since I have written about how writing instruction can boost reading achievement. When I first started writing about that (almost 50 years ago), it was virtually an unknown topic. These days, most teachers tell me that they agree that writing can improve reading, though they don’t seem to have much understanding of the concept and quite often they skip the writing because of pressures to get higher reading scores. So it goes. Given recent experiences with such conversations, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the topic. There was nothing to change or update here but the original had no references, so I cited some of my contributions in this arena. I still believe that a quarter of your language arts instruction should focus on writing – and this entry provides practical advice to help you accomplish that in ways that can build both reading and writing. RELATED: What Does Brain Science Have To Say About Teaching Reading? Does It Matter?

Teacher question:

Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we don’t have a writing program). We test the students three times a year in reading, but never in writing. Writing isn’t even on our report card, though I guess it is part of Language Arts. What should we be doing with writing?

Shanahan response:

You came to the right place.

I think your school is making a big mistake not devoting sufficient attention to writing.

When I was a teacher my primary grade kids wrote every day. When I became a researcher, I conducted studies on how reading and writing are related. As director of reading for Chicago, I required 30-45 minutes per day of writing in all our classrooms.

There are, of course, a lot of good reasons why someone should learn to write. Many jobs, mine included, require it – and often jobs that require a lot of writing pay better (I’m sure many nurses would disagree with that last point). Of course, writing is also an important form of self-expression. Just as there are people who play musical instruments, dance, sing, paint, knit, cook, and so on, many use writing as a form of self-expression and to preserve memory. All those are terrific reasons for teaching writing.

I’m going to guess that the reason your school is ignoring writing is because someone thought that might help raise reading scores. That’s a mistake because writing can be a path to higher reading achievement, so your kids (and your school) are missing out. Instead of elevating the reading scores, your school is probably squashing them.

So, there are lots of reasons for teaching writing, and this entry focuses on one of them: how writing can help kids to become measurably better readers.

Research has identified three important ways reading and writing are connected – and all three deserve a place in your curriculum.

First, reading and writing draw upon the same body of knowledge and skills. If you want to be a reader you must perceive the separable phonemes within words, recognize the most common spelling patterns, link meanings to the words in the text (vocabulary), understand the grammar well enough to permit comprehension, trail cohesive links accurately, and recognize and use discourse structure (texts are organized and recognizing this in a text improves comprehension). Of course, background knowledge plays a role in reading comprehension, too, so the more readers know about their world the better they may do in reading. Yep, learning to read requires all of that.

But think about it. That knowledge is integral to writing too. If kids can’t hear the phonemes, match sounds and letters, and remember spelling patterns, they won’t be able to get words on the page. The same can be said about all those other linguistic and content features of text needed for reading. That means when you are teaching the foundations of reading, you are also teaching the foundations of writing.

It is the same knowledge base, and yet, they play out differently because readers and writers start in different places. A reader looks at the author’s words and starts decoding—matching the phonology in their head to the author’s orthography. The writer thinks about the words he/she wants to write, thinks about the phonemes, and tries to remember what letters or patterns will represent those. The same thing happens with the other elements, too – one starts with ideas and turns them into written language, and the other marches in the opposite direction.

What is my advice about taking advantage of this overlap? Teach the reading skills that you teach now, but then think hard about them. How would kids use that skill in reading and writing? For example, when you teach letter sounds, you should be teaching kids to use those sounds to sound out words. It is a pathetic phonics lesson that includes no decoding practice. But also have your students try to write the words. Many programs include dictation, and that’s great.

I’m partial to invented spelling because it provides such extensive and supportive practice with the sounds. Look at this simple K-1 message:

Hermet Krabs liv in shels sum tims tha lev on the bech.

[Hermit crabs live in shells. Sometimes they live on the beach.]

This piece of writing didn’t take long to produce, but to accomplish it the student had to analyze 38 phonemes. He got most of them reasonably right, too. The most ambitious phonemic awareness lessons usually would NOT have any individual child practicing 38 phonemes, so encouraging this kind of writing is smart teaching.

You can do the same with older kids when you teach informational text structure. For reading, that would usually entail teaching how problem-solution texts are organized, and then having the students read texts with that structure to gin up comprehension. That can be even more effective if the kids try to compose their own problem-solution texts – and what a great opportunity to review science or social studies content at the same time.

Second, reading and writing are communication processes. Studies show that writers think about their audiences and what they need to tell their readers to communicate effectively. That might not be surprising, but there are also studies showing the value of having readers think about authors and authors’ perspectives (this is emphasized in educational standards and is essential for reading history and for certain approaches to literary text, too).

Writing approaches that involve kids in reading and responding to each other’s texts are beneficial in improving the quality of kids’ writing. There are any number of ways that teachers can facilitate this kind of sharing and heighten awareness that texts are written by somebody. Doing this can sensitize young authors to the kinds of things that may confuse or entice their readers. Writing conferences, writer’s workshop, and revision circles are just a few ways this can be done.

On the reading side, it can help to read texts in which authors have a strong voice and/or style. It is terrific when kindergarteners find that they can recognize Dr. Seuss books or when third graders can distinguish a Beverly Cleary from a Barbara Cooney with their eyes closed. I like to have these students write imaginary biographies of the authors, based only on the content and tone of the texts we are reading. Of course, as kids get older, these kinds of things are addressed by having students read primary source text sets in their social studies classes and evaluating the trustworthiness of this material based on who the authors are and when they recorded their ideas.

Being author can give students insights into what is happening off-stage (what is the author doing back there?), which can boost critical reading ability. Likewise, being a thoughtful writer gives writers insights into what their readers might need.

The third way that reading and writing can connect is through combined use. Reading and writing can be used together to accomplish goals. Most research on combined uses emphasize two specific academic goals, so I’ll limit my comments to those; specifically, studying or learning from text and composing synthesis papers, like school reports.

In the first, writing is added to reading to increase understanding or improve memory. Research finds that writing about what one is trying to learn from text is beneficial. Often when students read for a test, they read and reread and hope for the best. Studies show that reading and writing summaries, analyses/critiques, or syntheses of the information has a powerful and positive impact on learning. We should be teaching students how to use writing in concert with reading to improve comprehension, increase knowledge, and conquer academia.

The second body of research explores synthesis writing. Teaching students how to collect information appropriately from text sources enables easier and more effective syntheses. Instead of just having kids write a report with three sources or something like that, guide them to plan a paper with a particular purpose or structure and then help them to read the texts in ways that will facilitate this writing. For instance, if students are to write some kind of comparison of sources, provide a summarization guide that facilitates the collection of comparable information from the two texts (such as charting which points on which the texts agree and disagree). Reading the texts in that way should enhance the writing.

Too many principals think that ignoring and even discouraging writing frees up time better devoted to higher reading scores. Too many teachers are anxious about writing because of the limited preparation they receive in this area. But having kids writing every day – in any and all of the ways described here is a good idea.

Not doing so leaves reading achievement points on the table.

As Vivian says in Pretty Woman: “BIG MISTAKE!”

Fitzgerald, J., & Shanahan, T. (2000). Reading and writing relations and their development. Educational Psychologist, 35, 39–51.

Shanahan, T. (1984). Nature of the reading-writing relation: An exploratory multivariate analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology , 76 , 466–477.

Shanahan, T. (1997). Reading-writing relationships, thematic units, inquiry learning… In pursuit of effective integrated instruction. The Reading Teacher, 51, 12–19.

Shanahan, T. (1998). Readers’ awareness of author. In R. C. Calfee & N. Spivey (Eds.), The reading-writing connection. Ninety-seventh Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (part II, pp. 88–111). Chicago: NSSE.

Shanahan, T. (2004). Overcoming the dominance of communication: Writing to think and to learn. In T. L. Jetton & J. A. Dole (Eds.), Adolescent literacy research and practice (pp. 59–74) . New York: Guilford.

Shanahan, T. (2006). Relations among oral language, reading, and writing development. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 171—186). New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2016). Relationships between reading and writing development. In C A. MacArthur, Steve Graham, & Jill Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2 nd ed., pp. 194-210). New York: The Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2019). Reading-writing connections. In S. Graham, C.A. MacArthur, & M. Hebert (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (3 rd ed., pp. 309-332). New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (Ed.). (1990). Reading and writing together: New perspectives for the classroom . Norwood, MA: Christopher Gordon.

Shanahan, T. & Lomax, R. (1986). An analysis and comparison of theoretical models of the reading-writing relationship. Journal of Educational Psychology , 78 , 116–123.

Shanahan, T., & Lomax, R. (1988). A developmental comparison of three theoretical models of the reading-writing relationship. Research in the Teaching of English , 22 , 196–212.

Shanahan, T., & Tierney, R. J. (1990). Reading-writing connections: The relations among three research traditions. In J. Zutell & S. McCormick (Eds.), Literacy theory and research: Analyses from multiple paradigms . (Thirty-ninth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, pp. 13–34). Chicago, IL: National Reading Conference.

Tierney, R., & Shanahan, T. (1991). Reading-writing relationships: Processes, transactions, outcomes. In P. D. Pearson, R. Barr, M. Kamil, & P. Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (vol. 2, pp. 246–280). New York: Longman.

Here is a link to the original posting of this blog in case you would like to see the 26 comments that were made in response to it.

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/how-can-we-take-advantage-of-reading-writing-relationships

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

See what others have to say about this topic.

I teach world languages and took a "Science of Reading" course, because I believe that reading is central to learning anything. Listening and reading are the two receptive skills. Speaking and writing are the two expressive skills. In order to meaningfully communicate in the outside world, all of those skills are a part of the puzzle. The OP's school is teaching to a flawed test and is setting up those students to fail. I used to work in a school system that told teachers to teach to the test. I always have believed to teach beyond the test. The goal is to produce students who can solve problems in the real world, not wait for someone to give them the answer. The field of medicine, among many others, is full of people who are problem solvers.

So glad you reposted this topic. The "Writing to Read" research guide (Graham & Hebert, 2010) highlights multiple ways that writing supports reading. The first recommendation is to have students write personal reactions to text, learn to take notes from text, and answer/create questions about text in writing. Summarizing is also a key recommendation, something that we have long known supports comprehension, and was also identified in the "Writing Next" research guide (Graham & Perin, 2007) as one of the 11 instructional practices that improve student writing. In my book "The Writing Rope: A Framework for Explicit Writing Instruction in All Subjects" and in the two professional development courses I developed for Keys to Literacy (Keys to Early Writing, Keys to Content Writing), I emphasize the importance of integrating writing and reading instruction. This includes using model texts that students "read as writers" to analyze with the teacher and then emulate in their writing. The focus of these sample texts should be specific and purposeful, such as how to write a claim for an opinion piece, how to use transitions, or how to write a good paragraph topic sentence. I have also long emphasized the importance of using writing to learn, which can be simple quick writes, teaching students to use two-column notes, and writing summaries about something read, said or done in the classroom. For followers of your blog, there is a large collection of free resources at the Keys to Literacy website, including blog posts I have written related to writing, and free archived webinars: https://keystoliteracy.com/free-resources/ and https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/ My Feb 2023 post was "Teaching Text Structure to Support Writing and Comprehension."

Of course, we need to address the elephant in the room! How can so many teachers and administrators be so clueless as to the important relationships between reading and writing that you so expertly describe? Could it be that the woeful colleges of education fail to help teachers make these critical connections before releasing them to the schools? Could it be that education leaders allow too much autonomy in what gets taught in their classrooms? Could it be that it takes too much work and writing expertise for teachers to assess student written work with written descriptive feedback to help children improve their writing? The reality is that classroom walls should be filled with student writing aligned to specific learning targets with careful descriptive feedback from the teacher. Additionally the history of student writing should also be included to demonstrate student writing improvement over time! This instructional practice would go a long way in improving student writing and yes reading skills as well. Will it ever happen systematically? Not until there is a total transformation of K-12 education. Highly unlikely. We will have to live with special case successes! Read The Fog of Education.

Great post. So important to do both. Carol Chomsky was a professor of mine (invented spelling) and I have found having kids tap spell before writing the word is so powerful, especially if they first tap phonemes to see how many taps, and then articulating the graphemes within those taps. This way they know "hmmm sigh has two taps but hmmmm si doesn't look right let me check that". It is useful to have a reference for the spelling of phonemes. Keeping charts, "graphemes that represent the phoneme _____" works well and can be added to as new spellings are discovered as the child/class progresses. "Hmmm sie? sy? sigh? Can't be i__e because there is no consonant." Even if they ultimately choose the wrong one in their piece they are learning the possible graphemes that respresent that phoneme.

Tim, the letter I wrote that was published last week in The New York Times (January 11) is on this very topic.--Best wishes, Allen Berger, Heckert professor of reading and writing emeritus, Miami University (Ohio)..

Oh thank you for reposting on this important topic! I teach all future and current teachers the importance of writing, how to analyze a child's writing and developmental spelling, and employ writing to support emergent readers in conceptual understanding and use of the alphabetic principle. I have developed multiple grade level clustered online courses (free and asynchronous) in writing development for my state. It is a huge lost opportunity and missing link in a speech to print approach (expressive to receptive) to reading foundations and so much more! Thanks to you for your continued advocacy for the importance of writing and to Joan for a useful teacher friendly new text on the nuts and bolts. In classrooms I visit, copying from board or book is often called "writing." No words for how frustrating this is understanding the depth of this lost learning opportunity. All reading foundational skills are richly practiced in the act of writing.

Miriam P. Trehearne In August 2022 I posted a review of Shifting the Balance 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates: Having written six successful literacy focused professional books for teachers, having been a classroom teacher, an Early Childhood and Early Literacy Specialist, Program Specialist (exceptional needs students) Literacy Coach, and University Associate and having worked with teachers and administrators around the world, I am aware of the politics and the challenges involving the “reading wars”. They are numerous. Pendulum swings often disenfranchise teachers, students, and parents. Many experienced teachers suffer as they continue to live through pendulum swings (e.g. whole language versus phonics, as if the two are, or ever were, mutually exclusive). The review focused on one very key area which was omitted and provided the research-base behind it. Burkins and Yates did not include writing when discussing the Balanced Literacy Classroom. This is a serious omission. The research described by Bill Teale in his article “The Curriculum Gap Ensures a Continuing Achievement Gap” (2007) is important. This research indicates that writing is one of three key areas often neglected in early literacy classrooms. This curriculum gap means that many young children are being shortchanged and will suffer the consequences in later grades (Teale, 2014). In her landmark research, Dolores Durkin (1966) discovered that the parents and caregivers of children who had learned to read before coming to kindergarten had read with their children. However, they did more than this. They gave their children many writing opportunities. It became clear that early readers generally are very interested in writing, and many write long before they read. Writing often provides a foundation for reading. Many experienced teachers have seen young children develop both reading skills and the love of reading, in part, through writing. In a study of beginning literacy learning, kindergarteners’ writing behaviors were found to be predictive of subsequent (Grade 1) reading achievement, even after controlling for the effects of IQ (Shatil, Share and Levin, 2000). A complex theory of literacy learning acknowledges that writers have to know how to do certain things that overlap with things that readers have to know or do. The two processes are concurrent sources of learning and contribute to each other in early literacy learning. Reading and writing are reciprocal and interrelated processes (Marie Clay 2001). Canadian researchers, Harrison, Ogle, McIntyre, and Hellsten (2008), reviewed K–3 studies on early writing conducted in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The findings, published in a paper titled “The Influence of Early Writing Instruction on Developing Literacy,” indicated that early writing ---Supports the development of phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, and phonics ---Enhances early reading (word identification, decoding, passage comprehension, and word reading) and often precedes early reading. The quality of writing support for 4-year-olds is highly related to their language and literacy growth at the end of Kindergarten and Grade 1 (Dickinson and Sprague 2001). Writing is an activity that promotes alphabet letter knowledge, phonological awareness, phonics, concepts of print, including the fact that the end of a line is not always the end of a thought (Snow, Burns, and Griffin 1998). So, writing (including drawing) helps children to make sense of their world. And finally, the evidence from a meta-analysis shows that having students in Grades 2-12 write about material they have read, enhances their comprehension of it. This was true for students in general and students who were weaker readers and writers, in particular (Graham and Hebert, 2011). “Learning to write assists children in their reading; in learning to read, children also gain insights that help them as writers. But writing is more than an aid to learning to read; it is an important curricular goal. Through writing children express themselves, clarify their thinking, communicate ideas, and integrate new information into their knowledge base.” —Every Child a Reader, CIERA 1 And Tim, (2017) you sum it up beautifully with: Reading-writing relations start when reading and writing start. Many folks delay writing until a solid reading base is established. Research doesn’t support that: kids are able to draw reading benefits from the beginning. When young children first try to write, they have to think hard about print concepts. When young children first try to spell, they have to think hard about phonemic awareness. The impact of writing on reading must be considered part of any acceptable definition of science of reading instruction (Shanahan 2020). So, how can writing be eliminated from the Balanced Literacy Classroom when shifting the balance? Clearly the instructional practices identified by Burkins and Yates are too narrow and not complete. Thanks, Tim, for again providing a clear research-based and proven posting supporting the reading-writing connection, at all grade levels. Miriam Trehearne

My fairly large urban district has not had a writing program in over 10 years. For the last 5 years they have used an expensive purchased CORE curriculum which has a teacher reading out loud a grade level chapter book to students; "discussing something" and then writing this discussion together to be copied from the projector where it was typed. These are collected and made into a book for that topic. This happens 1-5 grades. No handwriting. NO spelling. NO sentence analysis or practice, No paragraph etc. No vocabulary help from the program. Because there is an enforced pacing guide and testing, teachers are loathe to add and teach anything other than what is presented in the manual. One topic for 4th grade for a lesson: compare and contrast the American historical fiction genre with another type of historical fiction genre. I sent this topic around to high school English teachers, none of whom could do it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on this. Classes are heterogeneous and our El's are to remain in the classroom and be "supported" during this instruction. This is for 45-60 min daily. Phonics time lasts 30-40 minutes. It consists of a 10-15 minute "conference" with an individual student while the entire rest of the class reads from leveled books, alone. The teacher can conference with about 3 kids per day. After much yearly agitation from experienced teachers, we are now allowed to "conference" with small groups of the lowest students more often. I would love to have reactions to this!

ARD-- Except for the phonics time, this sounds horrible to me. tim

We spend tons of time writing in my class. I don't see how people don't, but based on conversations with other teachers at my school, writing is the FIRST to go. For me, we are doing writing, reading, math and writing EVERYday.. At the beginning of the year ...I read these kids writing and I'm just like....absolutely not, we need to improve this. I remember being in college and knowing adults who had no idea how to structure an essay. this kind of thing starts early. The curriculum my district provides...is not the best IMO. It's focused on genre, but mainly on kinda the free right, workshop approach....which is fine for some kids. but I've realized that a lot of kids need structure or they literally won't write, or they will and it'll be...concerning. I started using the writing revolution's techniques and I've been having tons of success. the kids know what to expect when we do writing, and because of the structure I've taken care to provide, they know what to do and there isn't as much anxiety

I think we just became best friends! "BIG MISTAKE...HUGE!"

As a third grade teacher, I struggled to teach writing until I took a class on using a writer’s workshop method to teach writing. This time became the most exciting and effective part of our language arts class. Not only did my students test scores increase, but they couldn’t wait until the next lesson came to work on their writing pieces. We treated those pieces like a painting. It was YOUR piece and you made the decisions on how to communicate your ideas. As a result, we ALL learned to read like writers. We discussed how writers chose to communicate their ideas and thoughts. Reading scores increased and their desire and knowledge of different types of books soared! I actually became an avid reader myself once I started reading like a writer. Time spent on teaching writing is essential for all schools.

What Are your thoughts?

Leave me a comment and I would like to have a discussion with you!

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First grader reading aloud from a Dr. Seuss book

Every elementary school teacher is a reading teacher and is essential in helping each child on his or her reading journey. When we provide the resources to meet the literacy needs of our students beginning as early as prekindergarten, students and teachers will feel both confident and competent in teaching and learning to read.

While helping students learn to read, it is also important to create a love of reading. Students who read voluntarily report less negativity about reading than those who are required to read.

Create Motivation

Motivation is the key in promoting a love of literacy in children. One of the best resources I have found for creating motivation is a shelf filled with books that match students’ interest level and reading level. They should be surrounded by titles that reflect the lives of themselves as well as their classmates. When students find titles with characters that look like them and families that resemble their own or their neighbors, their interest level increases. Making these connections also increases student comprehension.

Students should be provided with books that represent all genres so that they can determine what they most enjoy reading. Unless a child is given the opportunity to read poetry, mysteries, historical fiction, biographies, autobiographies, and science fiction, he or she may not know all of the types of stories that are created for readers of all ages. Student book choice is the first step in getting children hooked on reading. When students have ownership of their reading, successful, independent readers begin to bloom.

Teachers can be the best book matchmakers for their students. While teachers are building relationships with their students in the beginning of the year, they can also conduct one-on-one interviews or give interest surveys to each child. This practice will help teachers learn the strengths, challenges, likes, and dislikes of their students. This information helps teachers select the best book to spark a child’s interest in reading.

Peers can be a great resource for helping students find what books they will love to read. Encourage classmates to be book matchmakers by creating personalized book recommendations for their peers. It's easy to create a recommendation template that can be stacked in the class book nook. When students find a book they think would match the interests and hobbies of classmates, they can fill out the personalized book recommendation form and give it to their classmate.

Literacy diagnostic tools such as running records or anecdotal notes can also be used to understand the instructional and independent reading levels of students. During one-on-one or small-group reading instruction, teachers can note the reading behaviors they observe, including any errors made during reading, students’ responses to comprehension questions, or details about their expression, tone, or reading rate.

Read Together

Through daily guided reading, teachers can introduce students to high-interest instructional text across genres. Daily individualized reading practice gives students the opportunity to read books of choice on their independent reading level and grow as readers. Introduce children to multiple genres of books during small-group reading instruction. When children find a book of interest, they can turn the book into their choice book for independent reading time.

Background knowledge about a topic or subject matter can help students engage in the reading. For example, if a child has never been to a farm, he or she may not understand how the setting of the barn is crucial to the plot of a story that takes place on a farm. If a student has no prior knowledge about the roaring twenties, he or she will not fully comprehend an article about the Great Depression. Making stories and articles relevant to everyday life and current events is one more way to increase background knowledge. In order to build background knowledge before reading, teachers should consider taking students on virtual or live field trips or giving them access to real objects.

Assume that students have no understanding of the vocabulary words or content of the text. Allow them to make predictions, make connections, and ask questions before every reading experience to gauge their knowledge. These three comprehension strategies inform a teacher of the students’ proficiency about a particular topic. Encourage readers to use the title and pictures to make a prediction about what the book is about before reading it. During reading, students confirm their prediction and make a connection. Ask questions such as, “What does this text remind you of?” or “What is going to happen next?” to build comprehension.

Give students daily experiences in instructional guided reading, independent reading, and choice. Exposure them to culturally relevant and diverse genres, and guide them with comprehension strategies to enhance a love of reading.

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My Evolving Relationship with Writing

I didn’t always enjoy writing.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: how ironic that the blog writer didn’t always enjoy writing. Well, it’s true. My relationship with writing has been an emotional rollercoaster, with soaring highs and disheartening lows. However, by some chance it has led me to where I’m at today, and for that I am most happy.

I first started writing in elementary school. Like the other students, my writing was pretty basic and rudimentary. However, I developed a keen interest for it. My stories were a method for putting my thoughts and daydreams into reality. I based all of my stories off of the 2001 hit movie Spy Kids . The plot was essentially the same for all of my stories: my best friend, Stephen, and I, would have to solve a mystery, save the world, and defeat the bad guys. Pretty cliché, I know, but evidently my teacher took notice, and one day the principal of my school came into the classroom, gathered around all of the students, and read my stories to the class. A principal, reading MY stories, to my classroom?! At the time, this was roughly equivalent to winning the lottery, to me. I was so ecstatic, and my excitement about writing grew tenfold. My mind was then set; I was going to grow up and become a writer.

Soon enough I was in middle and high school, and I absolutely could not stand writing. What my elementary school teachers failed to tell me was that as I progressed through the grades, writing wouldn’t continue to be fictional and fun. No, writing was now all about research, analysis, and using facts. There was hardly any wiggle room for creativity or self-expression, and this was most certainly not my cup of tea. Like any other situation, I was able to assimilate and adjust my writing style to succeed in this new form of writing, but my passion for storytelling decreased to an all-time low. I can honestly say that at the time, academia caused the breakup between writing and me.

Only a year ago, I was a freshman here at UD. As I stepped into my Honors Colloquia writing course, Fantasies of Contagion, I have no idea what to expect. I had just completed ENGL 110 the previous semester, which was all about academic writing (just like middle and high school). However, I was surprised when I saw in the syllabus the assignment, “Create a fictional work that includes one of the concepts discussed in class.” I could hardly contain myself because I was so gleeful. Finally, after years of hating writing, I was back to doing what I love: writing about what interests me. I spent more time on that paper than I had on any other in a long time. I truly cared about how it turned out because (here’s the crazy part) I actually enjoyed writing it and didn’t mind that I stayed up until one in the morning writing it. It didn’t feel like work to me; it felt…right. I ended up receiving an A, and my professor suggested that I submit it to a literary magazine. Yes, it was a struggle, and some feelings were hurt, but writing and I got back together and formed a happy union once again.

Today, I can thankfully say that I still love writing. I have since increased my writing involvement by becoming a writer for this blog as well as a contributing writer for DEconstruction Magazine. Also, I am in the process of applying to be a Writing Fellow. As for the future, I have no idea what it holds. This hobby of mine could very well turn into a successful career. It could also become a lifelong hobby, or it could go back to being as painful as it once was. I can’t gaze into a crystal ball, so I’m just going to enjoy it while it lasts. Be on the lookout for more – I look forward to writing many more stories for your enjoyment!

Scott Eisenhart

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Essays About Relationships: Top 5 Examples Plus 8 Prompts

With rich essays about relationships plus prompts, this writing guide could help you contemplate relationships, including your own.

Healthy relationships come with the rewards of intimacy, love, and the support we need. Learning to preserve healthy relationships and throw out harmful ones is a critical skill to lead a successful life. That is exactly why Warren Buffet , one of the most successful investors, said the most important decision you will make is your choice of a significant partner.

There are several types of relationships your essay could focus on in your next piece of writing. Take a leap and tackle intimate individual-level relationships or community or even global-level relationships. You might also be interested in our list of books to read after a breakup .

5 Essay Examples

1. relationship weight gain is real — and can be a sign of happiness by angela haupt, 2. what does it mean to be ‘ready’ for a relationship by julie beck, 3. why adult children cut ties with their parents by sharon martin, 4. a relationship under extreme duress: u.s.-china relations at a crossroads by michael d. swaine, 5. how to build strong business relationships — remotely by jeanne m. brett and tyree mitchell, 1. strengthening communication in relationships, 2. helping children build healthy friendships, 3. how social media affects our relationships , 4. establishing relationships with influencers, 5. importance of police-community relationships, 6. dealing with challenging work relationships, 7. promoting cross-cultural relationships among schools, 8. why do long-term relationships fail.

“…[A]mong those who had been married for more than four years, happy couples were twice as likely to put on weight than couples who reported not being as content with their relationship.”

Gaining pounds when you’re in a relationship is real. This essay backs it up with research and even seeks to answer who puts on the most pounds in the relationship. For those hoping to transform their lifestyle, the essay offers practical tips couples can do together to lose pounds while protecting the relationship and preserving the joy that brought them together. You might also be interested in these essays about divorce .

“Readiness, then, is not a result of achieving certain life milestones, or perfect mental health. And checking off items on a checklist doesn’t guarantee a relationship when the checklist is complete.”

People have a variety of reasons for not being ready to commit to a relationship. They may be more committed to developing their careers or simply enjoy the solitude of singlehood. But this essay debunks the concept of readiness for building relationships. Through interviews, one finds that relationships can happen when you least expect them. You might also be interested in these essays about reflection .

“Parent-child relationships, in particular, are expected to be unwavering and unconditional. But this isn’t always the case—some adults cut ties with or distance themselves from their parents or other family members.”

No matter how painful it is, some adults decide to cut off family members to heal from a toxic or abusive childhood relationship or protect themselves if the abuse or toxicity continues. In exploring the primary causes of estrangement, the well-researched essay shows that estrangement may run deep with years of conflict and many attempts to recover the relationship, rather than merely being the whim of selfish adults.

“…Beijing and Washington are transitioning from a sometimes contentious yet mutually beneficial relationship to an increasingly antagonistic, mutually destructive set of interactions.”

The essay charts the 40-year relationship between China and the US and points out how both parties have mutually benefited from the bilateral relations. This starkly contrasts Washington’s accusation that the relationship has been a zero-sum game, one of the numerous oft-heard allegations in the Washington community. But with the looming increase in tension, competition, and potentially a devastating Cold War between the two, parties must work to find a middle ground.

“Although many managers have adapted to virtual meetings to replace face-to-face ones as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, developing new business relationships online presents a particular set of challenges.”

Authors interview 82 managers pre-pandemic and reconnect with some during the health crisis to find out how they have been building relationships with business partners through virtual meetings. Most admit the challenge of establishing trust and assessing partners’ competency, especially when billion-dollar deals are at stake. The authors offer four key pieces of advice to overcome these difficulties. You might find our guide on how to write a vow helpful.

8 Writing Prompts On Essays About Relationships

Essays About Relationships: Strengthening communication in relationships

We all know that communication is what strengthens relationships. But this is easier said than done when both sides want to talk and not listen. For this prompt, discuss the importance of open communication in relationships. Then, offer tips on how to improve communication in relationships and deal with communication gaps. One scenario you can look into is discussing problems in a relationship without getting into a heated debate.

In this essay, you can help parents become effective coaches for their children to make and keep friends. Warn them against being too authoritative in directing their children and instead allow the kids to be part of the ongoing conversation. Give your readers tips on how to build friendships such as promoting kindness, sharing, and understanding from a young age. You may also enjoy these essays about friendships .

When writing this essay, list the positive and negative effects of social media on relationships. A positive outcome of having social media is 24/7 access to our loved ones. One negative effect includes decreased time for more meaningful physical bonding. So, provide tips on how people in relationships can start putting down their mobile phones and talk heart-to-heart again.

Influencer marketing has become one of the most popular and effective ways to spread your brand message on social media. First, explore why consumers trust influencers as credible product or service review sources. Then, try to answer some of the burning questions your readers may have, such as whether influencer marketing works for big and small businesses and how to choose the perfect influencer to endorse your brand.

In a working police-community relationship, police officials and community members work together to fight crime through information-sharing and other measures. Discuss this interesting topic for an exciting essay.

First, look into the level of working relationship between the police and your community through existing enforcement programs. Then, with the data gathered, analyze how they cooperate to improve your community. You can also build on the United States Department of Justice’s recommendations to lay down the best practices for strengthening police-community relationships.

Essays About Relationships: Dealing with challenging work relationships

Amid competition, a workplace must still be conducive to cooperative relationships among employees to work on shared goals. Create an essay that enumerates the negative effects of work relationships on employee productivity and an office’s overall performance. Then cite tips on what managers and employees can do to maintain a professional and diplomatic atmosphere in the workplace. You can include points from the University of Queensland recommendations, including maintaining respect.

Students in a foreign country tend to feel distant from school life and society. Schools have a critical role in helping them feel at home and safe enough to share their ideas confidently. Set out the other benefits school environments can reap from fostering robust cross-cultural relationships and cite best practices. One example of a best practice is the buddy system, where international students are linked to local students, who could help expand their networks in the facility and even show them around the area to reveal its attributes.

When couples make it through the seven-year itch or the average time relationships last, everything down the road is said to be more manageable. However, some couples break up even after decades of being together. Explore the primary causes behind the failure of long-term relationships and consider the first signs that couples are growing distant from each other.

Look into today’s social sentiments and determine whether long-term relationships are declining. If they are, contemplate whether this should be a cause for concern or merely an acceptable change in culture. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers and our essay writing tips .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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What Europe Fears

American allies see a second Trump term as all but inevitable. “The anxiety is massive.”

A map of Europe with the shadow of Donald Trump looming over it

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I n early April , a crowd of diplomats and dignitaries gathered in the Flemish countryside to toast the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, and convince themselves it wasn’t about to collapse.

They arrived in a convoy of town cars that snaked down a private driveway and deposited them outside Truman Hall, a white-brick house set on 27 acres of gardens and hazelnut groves. Originally built by a Belgian chocolatier, the estate was sold to the American government at a discount—a thank-you gift for liberating Europe—and became the residence of the U.S. ambassador to NATO. Tonight, Julianne Smith, the inexhaustibly cheerful diplomat who currently holds the job, was stationed at the front door, greeting each guest.

The reception was part of a two-day onslaught of ceremonial activity ostensibly organized to celebrate the 75th anniversary of NATO. There were photo ops and triumphant speeches. The original copy of NATO’s founding charter was brought from Washington, D.C., for display, left open to the most important lines in the treaty, Article 5: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all …” Officials ate cake, and declared the alliance stronger than ever.

At Truman Hall, every effort was made to keep the mood festive despite a storm looming outside. Beneath a backyard tent, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke, followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

A photo-illustration of the secretary general of NATO Jens Stoltenberg.

Stoltenberg, lean and unrumpled, decided to do something diplomatically unorthodox: acknowledge reality. Anxiety about America’s commitment to the alliance had been omnipresent and unspoken; now Stoltenberg was directly addressing the dangers of a potential U.S. withdrawal from the world.

“The United States left Europe after the First World War,” he said, adding, with a measure of Scandinavian understatement, “That was not a big success.”

The wind was picking up outside, pounding the flaps of the tent and making it difficult to hear. Stoltenberg raised his voice. “Ever since the alliance was established,” he said, “it has been a great success, preserving peace, preventing war, and enabling economic prosperity—”

A strong gust hit the tent, rattling the light trusses above. Guests glanced around nervously.

Stoltenberg stumbled. “The great success has been, uh, enabled or has happened not least because of U.S. leadership—”

Another gust, and the large chandelier hanging over the crowd began to swing. Murmurs rippled through the audience. Stoltenberg, perhaps aware of the unfortunate symbolism that would result from a NATO tent collapse, got quickly to the point.

“I cannot tell you exactly what the next crisis or the next conflict or the next war will be,” he said, but “as long as we stand together, no one can threaten us. We are safe.”

Stoltenberg would tell me weeks later that the speech was intended as a rallying cry. That night, it sounded more like a plea.

T he undercurrent of dread at Truman Hall was not unique. I encountered it in nearly every conversation I had while traveling through Europe this spring. In capitals across the continent—from Brussels to Berlin, Warsaw to Tallinn—leaders and diplomats expressed a sense of alarm bordering on panic at the prospect of Donald Trump’s reelection.

“We’re in a very precarious place,” one senior NATO official told me. He wasn’t supposed to talk about such things on the record, but it was hardly a secret. The largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II was grinding into its third year. The Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed, and Russia was gaining momentum. Sixty billion dollars in desperately needed military aid for Ukraine had been stalled for months in the dysfunctional U.S. Congress. And, perhaps most ominous, America—the country with by far the biggest military in NATO—appeared on the verge of reelecting a president who has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance.

Fear of losing Europe’s most powerful ally has translated into a pathologically intense fixation on the U.S. presidential race. European officials can explain the Electoral College in granular detail and cite polling data from battleground states. Thomas Bagger, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry, told me that in a year when billions of people in dozens of countries around the world will get the chance to vote, “the only election all Europeans are interested in is the American election.” Almost every official I spoke with believed that Trump is going to win.

A photo-illustration of the NATO Headquarters with a fist tearing the photo apart.

The irony of Europe’s obsession with the upcoming election is that the people who will decide its outcome aren’t thinking about Europe much at all. In part, that’s because many Americans haven’t seen the need for NATO in their lifetime (despite the fact that the September 11 terrorist attacks were the only time Article 5 has been invoked). As one journalist in Brussels put it to me, the alliance has for decades been a “solution in search of a problem.” Now, with Russia waging war dangerously close to NATO territory, there’s a large problem. Throughout my conversations, one word came up again and again when I asked European officials about the stakes of the American election: existential .

“The anxiety is massive,” Victoria Nuland, who served until recently as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, told me. Like other diplomats in the Biden administration, she has spent the three-plus years since Trump unwillingly left office working to restabilize America’s relationship with its allies.

“Foreign counterparts would say it to me straight up,” Nuland recalled. “‘The first Trump election—maybe people didn’t understand who he was, or it was an accident. A second election of Trump? We’ll never trust you again.’”

BERLIN, GERMANY

T o understand why European governments are so worried about Trump’s return, you could study his erratic behavior at international summits, his fraught relationship with Ukraine’s president and open admiration for Russia’s, his general aversion to the liberal international order. Or you could look at the exceedingly irregular tenure of Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell.

Four years after he left Berlin, people in the city’s political class still speak of Grenell as if they’re processing some unresolved trauma. The mere mention of his name elicits heavy sighs and mirthless chuckles and brief, frozen stares into the middle distance. For them, Grenell’s ambassadorship remains a bitter reminder of what working with the Trump administration was like—and what Trump’s return would mean.

Often, people will tell you about the parties.

Hosting social functions is part of an ambassador’s job. But the parties Grenell threw were more eclectic than a typical embassy reception. The guest lists were light on German political elites—many of whom Grenell made a sport of publicly tormenting—and featured instead a mix of far-right politicians, semi-canceled intellectuals, devout Christians, gay Trump fans, and sundry other friends and hangers-on. Standard social etiquette was at times disregarded; so was good taste. When Grenell hosted a superhero-themed Halloween party at the ambassador’s residence in 2019, one male guest came dressed in a burka, while another wore a “suicide bomber” costume. Photos from the party circulated privately among mystified German journalists. “It was a freak show,” recalled one Berlin-based reporter who saw the pictures and who, like others I spoke with, requested anonymity to speak candidly about the former ambassador. (Grenell declined my request for an interview.)

The scandalized reaction to Grenell’s parties was emblematic of his broader reception in Berlin. A right-wing foreign-policy pundit and Twitter troll—he once posted that Rachel Maddow should “take a breath and put on a necklace” and talked about Michelle Obama “sweating on the East Room’s carpet”—he arrived in Germany in May 2018 at a moment of growing geopolitical anxiety. Despite efforts by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to develop a normal working relationship with Trump, the new president seemed intent on antagonizing Europe—hitting allies with tariffs, abruptly withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, and constantly questioning the need for NATO. Another ambassador might have seen it as his job to ease tensions. But Grenell was not just any ambassador.

He was belligerent and uncouth, less a diplomat than a partisan operative. He was “a special animal,” Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the U.S., told me. “He did not play by the rules.”

Hours after starting the job, Grenell tweeted a terse warning that “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” A few weeks later, he invited a Breitbart News reporter to his residence and said he planned to use his position to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe”—a comment widely interpreted as a political endorsement of European far-right parties, and one he later had to walk back.

A photo illustration of former Ambassador of the United States of America in Germany Richard Grenell

Grenell wasn’t any more tactful in private. In his first meeting with the German foreign ministry, according to a former diplomatic official in Berlin who was briefed on the encounter, Grenell announced, “I’m here to implement the American president’s interests.” The officials, taken aback by his audacity, tried politely to correct him: No, he was there to lobby for America’s interests. But Grenell didn’t seem to see the difference.

He hung a giant oil painting of Trump in the entryway of the ambassador’s residence, and made a party trick out of flaunting his access to the White House. He would call the Oval Office “for fun” just to show that “he had a direct line to the U.S. president,” recalled Julian Reichelt, a friend of Grenell’s who was then the editor of the right-leaning German tabloid Bild .

As Trump escalated his crusade against the European political establishment—publicly rooting for Merkel’s right-wing opponents and identifying the European Union as a “foe” —Grenell seemed eager to join in. After the president hijacked a NATO summit in July 2018 to deliver a tirade against countries that weren’t spending enough on defense, Grenell did his best to replicate the performance in Berlin.

The ambassador quickly became a villain in the German press. The magazine Der Spiegel nicknamed him “Little Trump.” German politicians publicly called on the U.S. to recall Grenell. One member of the Bundestag compared him to a “far-right colonial officer”; another was quoted as saying that he acted like “the representative of a hostile power.”

Some observers would later speculate that the bad press was the product of a leak campaign by Merkel’s government to isolate Grenell. Others believed that he deliberately courted outrage. “He didn’t care a bit about his reputation here,” Christoph Heusgen, the chair of the Munich Security Conference, told me. “He cared about offending the Germans and making headlines because he knew his boss would love that.” Soon enough, the president was referring to Grenell as “my beautiful Ric” and reportedly telling advisers that his man in Berlin “gets it.”

Grenell’s defenders would later argue that his hardball tactics got results. Take, for example, his vociferous opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The U.S. had long objected to its construction, which would dramatically increase Germany’s reliance on Russian energy. But Grenell pressed the issue much harder than his predecessors had—sending letters threatening sanctions against companies that worked on the project, and successfully lobbying Berlin to import American liquefied natural gas. After Russia invaded Ukraine, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier admitted that clinging to Nord Stream 2 had been a “mistake.”

To Grenell’s admirers, it was his effectiveness that made him unpopular in Berlin. “The ideal U.S. ambassador for your average German government,” Reichelt told me, “just talks nicely about, like, the American dream and transatlantic relations and blah blah and freedom blah blah and what we can learn from each other.” Grenell refused to be a mascot. “He was doing politics—he was actually driving policies,” Reichelt said. (Reichelt was fired from Bild in 2021 after The New York Times reported on a sexual relationship he’d had with a subordinate; Reichelt denied abusing his authority.)

But by the time Grenell left Berlin, the mutual disdain between the ambassador and the political class was so thick that some wondered if he’d kept an enemies list. Grenell, who briefly served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, is reportedly on the shortlist for secretary of state or national security adviser in a second Trump administration, which means he’d be in a position to make life difficult for political leaders he disfavors. “I know many of these ministers, and they would be afraid,” one prominent German journalist told me. “I think he’s a guy who doesn’t forget.”

The Germans are bracing for Trump’s return in other ways. Inside the foreign ministry, officials have mapped out a range of policy areas likely to be destabilized by his reelection—NATO, Ukraine, tariffs, climate change—and are writing detailed proposals for how to deal with the fallout, multiple people told me. Can Trump’s moods be predicted? Who are his confidants, and how can the government get close to them?

The Germans have a contingency plan for President Joe Biden’s reelection too, but few seem to think they’ll need it. They’re preparing for a third scenario as well: a period of sustained uncertainty about the election’s outcome, accompanied by widespread political violence in the U.S. Nuland, the recently departed State Department official, told me that, based on her conversations with foreign counterparts, Germany isn’t alone in planning for this possibility. “If you are an adversary of the United States, whether you’re talking about Putin, Iran, or others, it would be a perfect opportunity to exploit the fact that we’re distracted,” she said.

René Pfister, Der Spiegel ’s Washington bureau chief, told me that the first Trump administration left Germany struggling with difficult questions about its relationship with the U.S. Was America still interested in being the leader of the free world, or would it be governed by ruthless self-interest like China and Russia? Could it be counted on to defend its allies if Trump were reelected? “The Germans always had the impression that, regardless of the political affiliation of the president, you can rely, on the big questions, on the United States,” Pfister told me. “I think this confidence is totally shaken.”

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

O ne afternoon in early April, I listened in as Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador who’d hosted the event at Truman Hall, conducted a virtual press briefing from NATO headquarters. Journalists had called in from across Europe, and their questions reflected the unease on the continent. A reporter from Portugal asked about the prospect of NATO countries reinstating military conscription in light of the Russian threat. Another, from Bulgaria, asked Smith to respond to politicians there pushing to withdraw from the alliance. A TV-news correspondent from North Macedonia asked whether Smith thought Russia would take the Balkans next if Ukraine fell.

When President Biden set about filling diplomatic posts after his election, he made reassuring rattled allies a top priority. Smith fit the mold of a model ambassador—a career foreign-policy wonk with deep government experience and comfortingly conventional views on America’s role in the world. She also brings a boundless Leslie Knopeian energy to the job, and has been well schooled in the finer points of diplomat-speak: She scarcely mentions a country or region without first establishing friendship—“our friends in the Middle East,” “our friends in Portugal”—and she does not talk to these friends; she only “engages” them (as in “I went to the Vatican quite a while ago to engage them on the war.”).

A photo illustration of the United States Permanent Representative to NATO Julianne Smith.

Listening to the press briefing, I thought Smith did well—she sounded calm and confident and relentlessly optimistic. But when the briefing ended, I was ushered into a hallway to await my scheduled interview with the ambassador, and I overheard her fretting to an aide about how she’d handled a question about recent Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure inside Russia. American officials, worried about escalation, were reportedly urging Ukraine to stop the attacks, and Smith had responded that the U.S. was “not particularly supportive of” Ukraine going after targets on Russian soil. Now she was second-guessing herself. Maybe she should have said that the U.S. doesn’t “encourage” the attacks, or that the attacks don’t have America’s “blessing.” (Last week, the Biden administration gave Ukraine permission to use American weapons to attack Russian targets in limited circumstances.)

“Maybe I’m splitting hairs,” I heard Smith say. “Just with my lack of sleep, I didn’t have my game face on. I didn’t nail it.” She sounded exhausted.

During our interview, I asked Smith if the job was what she’d expected. She laughed: “No, no, no.” Part of what had appealed to her about the NATO post was the potential for a 9-to-5 lifestyle. Her kids were still young, and she’d been looking forward to some work-life balance. Then, six weeks after she moved to Brussels, Russia invaded Ukraine, and all of a sudden she was at the center of a geopolitical crisis.

Smith told me her ambassadorial role is unique in that she doesn’t have just one host country to worry about when she makes public statements. She’s speaking to audiences in dozens of countries, and each one needs to hear something different from her. “You have to sit down and understand: ‘What is it that’s keeping you awake at night?’” she said. Maybe it’s an errant Russian missile entering their airspace. Or a destabilizing wave of refugees. Or a cyberattack. Or tanks crossing their borders. “They’re obviously looking to hear time and time again that the U.S. commitment to the alliance, and particularly Article 5, is ironclad and unwavering.”

Smith has developed an arsenal of sanguine talking points to convey this message. She cites U.S. opinion polls showing strong support for NATO. She rehearses America’s long, bipartisan history of standing by its European allies. “For over seven decades,” she told me, “American presidents of all political stripes have supported this alliance.”

I encountered the same performative positivity in meetings with American diplomats throughout Europe. In Warsaw, Ambassador Mark Brzezinski sat in the airy living room of his residence and talked about the “economic efficiencies” America has enjoyed as a result of its alliance with Poland. “The Poles are spending billions of dollars to protect themselves, mostly buying from U.S. defense contractors,” he said. In Berlin, Ambassador Amy Gutmann met me in an embassy room overlooking the Brandenburg Gate and recounted the heroic role America had played in the massive airlift that broke the 1949 Soviet blockade of West Berlin. “Before I came here,” Gutmann told me, “President Biden said, ‘Make sure you tell every person you meet in Germany how important the U.S.-German relationship is.’ And I’ve done that.”

But sentimental rhetoric and gestures of goodwill only go so far. George Kent, the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, told me about an Earth Day photo op he’d taken part in earlier this year. The plan was to plant a tree at the Park of Friendship in central Estonia. Upon arrival, he was greeted by a kindly septuagenarian gardener who’d been participating in the tradition for decades. Kent tried to make small talk about horticulture, but the gardener had other things on his mind: “Can we talk about the vote in Congress?” He wanted the latest news on the Ukraine aid package.

In interviews, State Department officials in Washington, who requested anonymity so they could speak candidly, acknowledged that efforts to “reassure” European allies are largely futile now. What exactly can a U.S. diplomat say, after all, about the fact that the Republican presidential nominee has said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that he considers freeloaders?

“There’s not really anything we can do,” one U.S. official told me. European leaders “are smart, thoughtful people. The secretary isn’t going to get them in a room and say, ‘Hey, guys, it’s going to be okay, the election is a lock.’ That’s not something he can promise.”

WARSAW, POLAND

“W hat the fuck is happening in the United States?”

Agnieszka Homańska, seemingly startled by her own outburst, slowly placed her hands on the table as if to calm herself. “Sorry for being so frank.” We were sitting in a crowded bistro in downtown Warsaw with retro pop art on the walls and American Top 40 playing from the speakers. Homańska, a 25-year-old grad student and government worker who wore sneakers and a T-shirt that said BE BRAVE , was trying to explain how Poles her age felt about this year’s U.S. election.

Homańska exhibited none of the casual contempt for America often associated with young people in other European capitals. In the history she grew up learning, Americans were the good guys—defeating the Nazi occupiers, tearing down the Iron Curtain. Surveys consistently find that Poland is the most pro-America country in Europe, and one of the few where public opinion doesn’t change based on which party controls the White House. Ronald Reagan is a hero to many here; so is George H. W. Bush. In Poland, the mythology of America—vanquisher of tyrants, keeper of the democratic flame—persists. The U.S. is still a city on a hill.

But the Trump era punctured Homańska’s image of America, as it did for many younger Poles. Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election was jarring to those who saw the U.S. as an aspirational democracy. The storming of the Capitol on January 6 “was broadcast on every television,” she told me. Trump’s criminal charges—and his recent conviction on 34 felony counts in a Manhattan court—have made the news here too. “People don’t understand why Trump can still run for president.” (Like others I spoke with, Homańska was also confused by the fact that Joe Biden, who struck her as feeble and out of touch, is running again—were these really the best options America could muster? I told her she wasn’t alone in wondering about this.)

Many Poles see Trump through the prism of their own country’s recent politics. The right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party came to power in Poland a year before Trump’s election, and spent the next eight years co-opting democratic institutions, from the courts to the civil service to the public media. The government maintained a cozy relationship with Trump—President Andrzej Duda famously proposed naming an American military base in Poland after him—and he is still popular among conservative Poles. But last year, an intense electoral backlash to Law and Justice produced the largest voter turnout in Poland’s post-Soviet history, driven by young people. The new government, a coalition spanning from the center-left to the center-right, is focused on repairing Poland’s democracy.

After the election, Homańska decided to postpone her planned studies in Canada so she could help rebuild her country. When I asked her which countries she looked to as democratic role models, she mentioned Finland and Estonia, another former Soviet country that has successfully modernized. “Maybe there is something about the maturity of French democracy,” she added.

And America? I asked.

Homańska hesitated. “I don’t think that people my age would perceive America as an ideal way to create a democratic society,” she replied. She seemed almost apologetic.

An illustration of NATO nation flags with the USA flag scribbled out.

Many of the Poles I met were especially perplexed by one recent display of U.S. political dysfunction: the struggle to pass a military-aid package for Ukraine earlier this year. Polls showed that a majority of Americans supported the funding. Reporting suggested that most members of Congress favored it too. But somehow, because Trump opposed it, a minority of Republicans in the House had succeeded in holding up the bill for months while Ukraine was forced to ration bullets and let Russian missiles level buildings. Although the aid package finally passed in late April, some Western officials worry that the battlefield advances Russia made during the delay will be difficult to reverse.

The Russian threat is no abstract matter in Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk has talked about living in a “prewar era” and regularly urges citizens to prepare for a conflict. I heard stories about people stocking up on gold and looking for apartments with basements that could double as bomb shelters. Schools are running duck-and-cover drills, and shooting ranges have become more popular as people realize they might soon need to know how to handle a gun. One Polish woman told me about a phone call she’d received from her aunt, who was wondering if she should restain her wood floors or save her money because her house might be destroyed soon anyway.

In Warsaw, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski (who is married to the Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum) told me, “you will feel the physical vulnerability.” Travel 200 miles north and you reach Kaliningrad, where Russia is said to house nuclear weapons; go 200 miles east, and you hit the Ukrainian border. “It concentrates the mind.”

Poland has recently increased defense spending to 4 percent of its GDP—well beyond the standard of 2 percent set by NATO, and higher even than in the U.S. But officials know they’ll never be able to fend off a hostile Russia alone.

“It’s an existential threat,” Aleksandra Wiśniewska, who was elected to Poland’s Parliament last year, told me. Like other Polish politicians I spoke with, Wiśniewska—a 30-year-old former humanitarian aid worker who now sits on the foreign-affairs committee—was reluctant to say anything that might alienate the former, and perhaps future, American president. But she wanted me to understand that the choice American voters make this fall will reverberate beyond U.S. borders.

“I fear that the old United States that we all almost revere,” Wiśniewska told me, is “now sort of self-sabotaging. And by consequence, it will jeopardize the safety and security of the entire global order.”

FRANKENBERG, GERMANY

T he U.S. Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment left Vilseck, Germany, before dawn on April 9 in a convoy of camouflaged jeeps, fuel tankers, armored vehicles, and trucks packed with soldiers and ammunition. They rumbled past windmills and pastoral villages, stopping only for fuel. Speed was essential: The road march to Bemowo Piskie, Poland, was more than 800 miles, and the fate of the Western world was—at least hypothetically—at stake.

The regiment was training for a long-dreaded crisis scenario: a Russian invasion of the Suwałki Gap. The 60-mile stretch of Polish farmland is sparsely populated but strategically important. If Russian forces annexed the territory, they could effectively seal off Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia from the rest of NATO. To save the Baltic states, allies in Northern Europe would have to mobilize quickly.

During a refueling stop at a German barracks in Frankenberg, U.S. Army officers rattled off facts to me about the Stryker, a lightweight armored vehicle that looks like a tank but can drive up to 60 miles an hour, and demonstrated a language-translation app they’d developed to facilitate communication among allied troops. The drill they were conducting that day was part of a monthslong NATO military exercise—the largest since the end of the Cold War—involving all 32 allied countries; more than 1,000 combat vehicles; dozens of aircraft carriers, frigates, and battleships; and 90,000 troops. Although NATO officials have been careful not to single out Russia by name, the intended audience for the war games was clear. “Are exercises like this designed to send a message? They are, absolutely,” Colonel Martin O’Donnell told me as soldiers in fatigues milled around nearby. “The message is that we’re here. We’re ready. We have the capability to work with our allies and partners and meet you, potential adversary, wherever you may be.”

But the demonstration in Frankenberg sent another, perhaps less convenient, message as well. The convoy rushing to confront a theoretical Russian invasion was composed almost entirely of U.S. soldiers driving U.S. vehicles filled with U.S.-made guns and bullets and missiles. They’d link up with military units from other NATO countries eventually. But if America were removed from the equation, would the battle group in Bemowo Piskie stand a chance?

Whether Trump wins or not, there’s a growing consensus in Europe that the strain of American politics he represents—a throwback to the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ’30s—isn’t going away. It’s become common in the past year for politicians to talk about the need for European “defense autonomy.”

“We can’t just flip a coin every four years and hope that Michigan voters will vote in the right direction,” Benjamin Haddad, a member of France’s National Assembly, said at an event earlier this year. “We have to take matters in our own hand.”

What exactly that would look like is a subject of intense debate. Italy’s foreign minister recently proposed forming a European Union army (an idea that’s been raised and rejected many times in the past). Others have suggested diverting resources from NATO to a separate European defense alliance (though European countries are not immune to the kind of populist nationalism that could make such alliances dysfunctional). Replacing the so-called nuclear umbrella provided by the U.S. arsenal would require countries such as Germany and Poland to develop their own nuclear stockpiles, to supplement the small ones France and the United Kingdom already have.

Within NATO, the immediate priority is “Trump-proofing” the alliance. In the past 18 months, Finland and Sweden have joined, each bringing relatively capable and high-tech militaries. Secretary-General Stoltenberg has also proposed shifting responsibility for Ukrainian arms deliveries from the U.S. to NATO in case the next administration decides to abandon the war.

Most notably, allied countries have dramatically increased their own military spending. I spoke with several officials who grudgingly credited Trump for this development—something NATO officials and U.S. presidents had spent decades advocating for unsuccessfully. In 2017, when Trump took office, only three allies, plus the U.S., were spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. This year, that number is expected to rise to at least 18. Trump’s criticism of paltry defense budgets was not only effective, Stoltenberg told me, but fair. “European allies have not spent enough for many years,” he said. (No doubt Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also factored into the increased spending.)

Even with the funding influx, many officials believe Europe still has a long way to go before it could defend itself alone. The U.S. has some 85,000 troops currently stationed in Europe—more than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined—and provides essential intelligence gathering, ballistic-missile defense, and air-force capabilities. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” Ischinger, the former German ambassador, told me. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

That reality has left politicians and diplomats across Europe honing their theories of Trump-ego management ahead of the U.S. election. To some, the former president’s emotional volatility represents a grave threat. The former diplomatic official in Berlin told me that in May 2020, Merkel called Trump to inform him that she wouldn’t be traveling to Washington for the G7 summit out of concern for COVID. Trump was enraged, according to the diplomat, who requested anonymity to describe a private conversation, and the call grew heated. A week later, Trump announced plans to permanently withdraw nearly 10,000 U.S. troops from Germany—a move seen within Merkel’s government as a petty act of revenge. (Biden later reversed the order; a spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Others think Trump’s ego could make him easier to manipulate. “He’s very transactional, and he’s very narcissistic,” the senior NATO official, who’s met Trump multiple times, told me. “And if you combine the two, then you can sell him—” the official paused. He recited an expression in his native language. Roughly translated, it meant “You can sell him turnips as if they’re lemons.”

What’s striking about these calculations is how thoroughly allies have already adjusted their perception of the U.S. relationship. I noticed a certain pattern in my conversations with European political leaders and diplomats: At some point in almost every interview, the European would begin pitching me on how much the U.S. benefits economically from the alliance. Preserving peace in Europe has sustained decades of lucrative trade for U.S. companies. A broader Russian war on the continent would be felt in the average American’s pocketbook. I later learned that these talking points were being encouraged by NATO officials as well as the U.S. State Department. The thinking behind the strategy is that Americans need to hear why supporting European allies is in their self-interest.

“They keep telling us how important it is to go and convince the housewives in Wisconsin and the farmers in Iowa,” a senior official from an allied country grumbled to me. “How many Americans are going to the housewives of southern Estonia or … the countryside in France to tell why Europe should stand by the United States?” He noted that the alliance protects the U.S. as well.

The more I listened to prime ministers and parliamentarians deliver the same earnest spiel, the more dispiriting I found it. At its most idealistic, the transatlantic alliance has always been about a shared commitment to democratic values. Now Europeans are bracing for an America that behaves like any other transactional superpower. Several officials expressed fears that Trump would turn America’s NATO membership into a kind of protection racket, threatening to abandon Europe unless this ally offers better trade terms, or that ally helps investigate a political enemy.

“We are exposed,” Bagger, the German state secretary, told me. Europe’s alliance with America, he said, “has served as our life insurance for the last 70 years.”

And with Vladimir Putin seizing territory in Europe and trying to unravel NATO, what choice would these countries have but to accept Trump’s terms?

NARVA, ESTONIA

T he city of Narva sits on Estonia’s eastern border, separated from Russia by a river and a heavily guarded bridge. Some experts believe that if World War III breaks out in the coming years, this is where it will begin. The city is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Russians, many of whom don’t speak Estonian and are therefore ineligible for citizenship. Western officials fear Putin might try to use the same playbook he developed in Crimea—enlisting Russian separatists to stoke unrest and create a pretense for annexing the city. Such a move would effectively dare the West to go to war with a nuclear power over a small Estonian city, or else watch the credibility of their vaunted alliance collapse. NATO calls this “the Narva scenario.”

On a cold spring morning, I drove two hours from the Estonian capital of Tallinn and arrived at the border-crossing station, a red-brick box of a building on the edge of the Narva River. There I met Aleksandr Kazmin, a border guard with close-cropped hair and a friendly face who spoke broken English with a thick Russian accent. He wore a patch on his coat that said Politsei and a gun on his hip.

The border checkpoint once saw a steady stream of commuters and tourists traveling back and forth between Russia and Estonia—at its peak, Kazmin told me, the station processed 27,000 people in a single day. But travel dropped dramatically once the war in Ukraine started. In the months following the invasion, many of the people coming across the Narva border were refugees. Then, earlier this year, Russia closed its side of the road for “renovations,” meaning that the only way to cross the bridge now is by foot. On the morning I visited, I saw a thin trickle of travelers—moms pushing strollers, young people with backpacks—shuffle in and out of the station.

Kazmin told me that the war had divided Narva, as it had the wider Russian diaspora. Those who are “already integrated in Estonian society” generally oppose Putin’s aggression, he said, but some “don’t want to integrate—they are living in Russian-media world.” He rolled his eyes before muttering in resignation, “Nothing to do. It’s their choice.”

I asked Kazmin if I could walk to the actual border, and he obliged. As we made our way across the bridge, passing a tangle of barbed wire that had been pushed to the side, he warned me that we might see a Russian border guard filming us from the checkpoint on the other side. Kazmin didn’t know exactly why the Russians did this—he guessed it was some kind of intelligence-gathering tactic—but it often happened when he brought a visitor to the bridge.

Sure enough, as we got closer, a guard appeared in the distance. He didn’t seem to have a camera, so I asked Kazmin if I could wave at him. Kazmin cautioned against it. Communication between the two sides, even for benign logistical coordination, is strictly regulated: Only specially trained officials at the station are allowed to talk to the Russians, and they do so using a Cold War–era crank phone.

We stopped when we reached the middle of the bridge. Kazmin told me this was the closest we would get to Russia, explaining that there was no permanent, official border; it was understood that the deepest point of the river was what technically separated the two countries, and that shifts over time. The spot was strangely beautiful. Below us, a current of water rushed toward the Baltic Sea; above us, a flurry of snow fell from the gray sky. Two imposing medieval fortresses faced each other from either side of the river, one built by the occupying Danes in the 13th century, the other by a Muscovite prince two centuries later—twin relics of conquests past. As I took in the view, Kazmin bounced up and down to keep warm, stealing glances at his Russian counterpart.

I thought about how much more precarious the world must feel to those living in a place like this, doing a job like his. The day before my visit to Narva, I had interviewed Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who talked about the stakes of preserving the transatlantic alliance. Her country has a population of 1.3 million and is roughly the size of Vermont. She recalled sitting in a meeting with other world leaders shortly after her election where they discussed the Russian threat. “I made a note in my notebook: ‘For some countries here, talking about security and defense is a nice intellectual discussion,’” Kallas told me. “‘For us, it’s existential.’”

After dozens of interviews, I’d become desensitized to politicians using this word. But walking back across the bridge, I thought I understood what she meant.

Kazmin pointed to a tall flagpole perched beside the Narva station. At the top, the Estonian flag waved in the wind; beneath it, a navy-blue flag with the NATO seal. He said that flag had been installed only a few months earlier. I asked him if he thought the day would ever come when he saw Russian tanks rolling across the bridge. Kazmin got quiet for a moment. He said Russia’s government has long promised that it would not attack the Baltics—but that Putin had said the same thing about Ukraine.

“When they tell us they will not do something,” he said, “it means for us that they can do it—or will do it.”

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Guest Essay

How New York’s Congestion Pricing System Could Have Been Saved

Traffic clogs an avenue in Manhattan south of 60th Street.

By Nicole Gelinas

Ms. Gelinas is a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

New York State’s congestion pricing program was once a promising method of charging drivers to use Manhattan’s most crowded streets. The abrupt announcement on Wednesday by Gov. Kathy Hochul to “indefinitely pause” the program may spell its permanent end, and not just for New York. The unfortunate decision may also harm other American cities ’ efforts to similarly control traffic.

It didn’t have to be this way. The state and city can salvage something from this failure by heeding the right lesson: stop trying to do the right thing the wrong way.

The concept of congestion pricing, under which car drivers in Manhattan would have to pay $15 (more for truck drivers) to enter the zone south of 60th Street, is sound. It was first proposed by the Lindsay administration more than a half-century ago, and now street space is even scarcer, as the city has repurposed much of it for walkers and cyclists.

Driving into or around dense Manhattan is the least efficient way of getting around. In 2019, New York’s last normal pre-Covid year, just 24 percent of the nearly 3.9 million people who came to core Manhattan each day came via car or truck, according to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council ; almost everyone else took mass transit. Car drivers impose a burden on the city, in collision danger, congestion (buses stall behind cars), noise and pollution. Congestion pricing would charge drivers for the inconvenience they cause.

Yet economic principle is not the same as gritty New York reality. The governor’s inept halt to the program offers a civics lesson: New York’s transit advocacy community, which long fought for congestion pricing, could not overlay a sound idea onto a dysfunctional state government whose elected officials flout good-government practices, focusing instead on short-term exigencies and ignoring key details of complex proposals.

There’s also a limit to how much experimentation a city can withstand when residents and commuters feel increasingly fearful and anxious on the public subways and streets that congestion pricing was supposed to improve.

One big obstacle that congestion pricing has always faced is that a majority of the public has never supported it. Granted, lawmakers are supposed to lead, not follow. But former Gov. Andrew Cuomo enacted it in a way that ensured it would never gain broad political support. Five years ago, instead of proposing congestion pricing as a stand-alone bill, he stuffed it into the state budget . By voting for it as just one vague element in the budget and not as a specific, detailed program of its own, lawmakers never had to put themselves on record firmly supporting it.

After Mr. Cuomo left office, congestion pricing had no powerful elected official with a stake in seeing it succeed. Nor did it have more than tepid political support in the city: neither the mayor at the time, Bill de Blasio, nor the current mayor, Eric Adams, fully embraced it.

The 2019 congestion pricing law embedded two further impediments to success. First, congestion pricing was to be a cordon toll: a toll to enter the Manhattan zone. That approach was once sound; London created its zone program in 2003 , when it was the only technology available.

Yet over the decades, the moment passed; a cordon toll has become increasingly obsolete. The system can’t differentiate between a van that moves around Manhattan all day making deliveries and a van that travels two blocks from the West Side Highway to a private garage. Any expert proposing a congestion pricing program today would propose a toll based on time spent traveling, or idling, within the congestion zone, and London is now exploring what comes next.

Second, Mr. Cuomo’s motive in enacting congestion pricing wasn’t to reduce congestion, but to raise money for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as its expenses outpaced billions in annual tax revenues. The law included no congestion-reduction mandate, but it did include a revenue-raising mandate. The M.T.A. had to raise $1 billion a year so that it could borrow against that money to raise $15 billion for infrastructure. In London, the point of congestion pricing was to cut driving, not raise large amounts of money; the program there raises only $460 million annually.

The strict $1 billion requirement locked the state into a program that couldn’t be flexible. It could have started off, for example, with a modest toll for cars, say $8, and only during peak hours, say, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Instead, the M.T.A., constrained by its revenue requirement, was forced to devise a 24-hour program, with a lower fee at night. (London’s program operates only from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. ) The toll, unavoidable in the late-night hours when mass transit is infrequent and congestion nonexistent, began to look more like a tax than a fee.

Those handicaps to an optimal congestion pricing program didn’t have to be insurmountable. But 2024 New York is not 2019 New York. The city’s slow recovery from Covid-19 lockdowns left little room for error. As of 2022, the last year for which full data are available, the number of people coming to Manhattan each day was 28 percent below 2019 levels . Driving has recovered more quickly than transit ridership, with car journeys now close to or above 2019 levels, and transit journeys less than three-quarters of normal for that year. Congestion pricing thus risks encouraging some drivers to work from home more often or out of Manhattan altogether rather than trying mass transit, reducing Manhattan’s chances for a full economic recovery.

New York’s deteriorated public safety and reduced public order since 2020 further harmed the prospects of congestion pricing. People are reluctant to return partly because they feel unsafe on the trains; New York has suffered 35 subway homicides since 2020, most of them random. Before 2020, it took nearly 17 years for the transit system to amass such a death toll. Disorder is rampant. Similarly, it’s hard to conjure up visions of traffic smoothly flowing on congestion-free streets when the public is terrified of moped and e-bike drivers zipping every which way, crowding pedestrians off sidewalks and regular cyclists from bike lanes.

There were other flaws that revealed themselves as the program began to become real. In August 2022, the M.T.A. released its draft environmental assessment, required by federal law, which showed that congestion pricing, by diverting some traffic around Manhattan, would result in more traffic in the Bronx, including as many as 704 more trucks a day on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, as well as more traffic on Staten Island and in northern New Jersey.

After an outcry from U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, the M.T.A. mitigated the projected impact on that borough, but only partly. The M.T.A. should have responded to New Jersey’s valid concerns by addressing the real issues — New Jersey drivers already pay tunnel tolls, whose substantial surpluses fund parallel transit into New York City — and negotiating a compromise, rather than waiting for New Jersey to file a federal lawsuit.

Governor Hochul could have addressed these issues over the nearly three years that she has been in office. She could have reduced congestion pricing’s $1-billion-a-year revenue requirement, allowing the M.T.A. to levy a less costly, peak-hours-only toll suitable for the post-Covid world. Alternatively, Ms. Hochul could have said back in 2021, 2022 or 2023 that the state would delay the program until New York’s economic recovery matched the rest of the nation’s.

Instead, she allowed the M.T.A. to undertake the yearslong charade of federal environmental review, including hourslong public testimony, and allowed a separate commission to go through a parallel charade last year of setting toll rates. It is understandable that an exhausted public wants to hear nothing of congestion pricing again.

Nevertheless, New York is not going to have a successful car-based recovery from the pandemic. Cars in numbers sufficient to move New Yorkers around do not fit in the city’s physical space (bike lanes or no bike lanes).

Someday, New York will have to charge drivers moving around in the city’s densest areas — and not just in Manhattan. Ms. Hochul can salvage something from her congestion pricing botch by exploring a pilot program to charge drivers by the mile in congested areas, starting with trucks, taxis and other commercial vehicles, whose drivers are already heavily monitored by government regulators. The Eastern Transportation Coalition has conducted voluntary pilots in several states. Asking drivers to volunteer for such pilots to see what works and what doesn’t — and giving them something in return for their participation — is a better way to build support than imposing a program whose overriding, immediate goal is to raise a lot of money.

For nearly a year now, Manhattan has become used to strange metal arms bearing cameras that extend over busy streets, ready to read license plates and E-Z Passes for the congestion pricing system. (They cost more than $500 million, along with related preparation.) The M.T.A. shouldn’t take those toll camera gantries down just yet. The state could use them to charge trucks to enter Manhattan at peak hours, or convert them into speed cameras.

For now, too, the gantries are a useful monument to the principle that we cannot try new things until we get the basics right, from passing a stand-alone bill with explicit lawmaker support, to being flexible about details as the city’s economy evolves. If something doesn’t bend, it breaks — and Ms. Hochul broke congestion pricing instead of bending it.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Her forthcoming book is “ Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets From the Car. ”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

10 noteworthy books for June

A witty essay collection and thrilling historical fiction await you.

Great new reads for June include a lavish thriller set in the international art world, historical fiction in Renaissance Italy and a medical mystery memoir from a young mother.

‘I’ve Tried Being Nice: Essays,’ by Ann Leary

Leary had an epiphany while dealing with a neighbor whose off-leash dogs were wreaking havoc. As she delivered a stern warning — “Look, I’ve tried being nice …” — the inveterate people-pleaser suddenly understood one of the benefits of getting older: the power of indifference. In funny and unpretentious essays on topics that include selling a beloved house, interacting with fans of her famous husband, Denis, becoming an empty nester and recovering from alcoholism, Leary shares stories from a lifetime of wanting to be liked. (Marysue Rucci, June 4)

‘Malas,’ by Marcela Fuentes

Set in a border town on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, Fuentes’s lively novel explores the intergenerational connection between two strong women. Lulu Muñoz is trying to keep her punk rock band a secret from her substance-abusing father while avoiding thoughts of her garish upcoming quinceañera celebration. When the enigmatic Pilar makes a surprise appearance at a funeral, she and Lulu form a friendship that leads to unexpected discoveries. (Viking, June 4)

‘Hell Gate Bridge: A Memoir of Motherhood, Madness, and Hope,’ by Barrie Miskin

Miskin’s searing memoir about her experience with a mysterious mental illness during and after her pregnancy provides a haunting window into the state of health care in the United States. Having weaned herself from antidepressants as a precaution before pregnancy, Miskin began an alarming descent into delusions and suicidal ideation which continued after her baby was born. A proper diagnosis of a rare and incurable disorder began her journey away from darkness, allowing her to fully experience being a wife, teacher and mother. (Woodhall Press, June 4)

‘Service,’ by Sarah Gilmartin

When Daniel, one of Dublin’s top chefs, faces accusations of sexual assault, Hannah’s mind returns to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end restaurant — the excitement of the glamorous dining room, the pressures of the kitchen and the wild parties after hours, where something sinister happened that changed her life. Meanwhile, Daniel’s wife, Julie, is hiding from the paparazzi and trying to understand the allegations against the man she loves. In alternating chapters, Gilmartin gives voice to Daniel, Hannah and Julie, perceptively delving into issues of silence, complicity and the aftermath of violence. (Pushkin Press, June 4)

‘The Throne,’ by Franco Bernini, translated by Oonagh Stransky

The first in a planned trilogy, Bernini’s engrossing historical novel follows Machiavelli’s trajectory through the corridors of power in 16th-century Italy. Sent by the Florentine Republic to spy on the plotting Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli shrewdly accepts a proposal to chronicle Borgia’s life story. As the relationship between the biographer and his subject evolves, each man relies on the other to achieve his political ambitions, yet only one will succeed. (Europa, June 11)

‘The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby,’ by Ellery Lloyd

Lloyd’s engaging historical mystery moves swiftly between pre-World War II Parisian art studios, the elite academic corridors of early 1990s Cambridge University and present-day Dubai, where a controversial masterpiece by British heiress and surrealist artist Juliette Willoughby appears on display after it was presumed lost in the fire that claimed her life. Art history scholars had been suspicious about the truth behind the painting’s loss, and the continuing investigation — with possible ties to a murder — uncovers scandalous secrets that someone might go to great lengths to keep quiet. (Harper, June 11)

‘Moonbound,’ by Robin Sloan

The author of “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” returns with a far-flung sci-fi adventure that begins 11,000 years in the future, when animals can talk and genetic manipulators called wizards rule. After 12-year-old Ariel fails to comply with a wizard’s directive to remove a sword from a stone, he is forced to flee the only place he has ever known in the company of a sentient ancient artifact whose purpose is to contain all the knowledge of human history. Ariel and his companion set out on a quest to save his home from the vindictive wizard, encountering danger and finding new friendships along the way. (MCD, June 11)

‘God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer,’ by Joseph Earl Thomas

Joseph Thomas — not the author but the novel’s similarly-named protagonist — is many things: an Iraq Army veteran; a single father; an emergency room technician at a North Philadelphia hospital; an Ivy-league student of medicine; and a Black man trying to find his place in a country that often judges him unfairly. Struggling to maintain balance between the incessant obligations of work, school and fatherhood, his everyday encounters are a continuous reminder of the difficulties he has faced while trying to build a life for himself. Joseph’s travails, told in a forceful stream of consciousness, expose the daily rhythms, obstacles and joys of one man’s life. (Grand Central, June 18)

‘Hombrecito,’ by Santiago Jose Sanchez

Sanchez’s powerful first novel follows a young boy from Colombia to the United States and back again as he struggles with abandonment issues, acclimating to a new homeland and grappling with his own queer sexual awakening. With a “father-shaped hole” in his heart, he pushes away from his single mother in a raucous attempt to define his own life. But accompanying her back to Colombia as an adult allows him to reconsider the childhood images he had of his parents — and perhaps find grace and acceptance. (Riverhead, June 25)

‘Husbands and Lovers,’ by Beatriz Williams

Single mother Mallory Dunne has just sent her 10-year-old son, Sam, off to summer camp when she gets an alarming call — her son has consumed a poisonous death cap mushroom. With Sam needing a new kidney that she can’t provide, Mallory’s only options are to contact Sam’s father, whom she hasn’t seen in more than a decade, or to locate her mother’s recently discovered birth family. In another timeline, Hannah Ainsworth, a traumatized World War II survivor married to a British diplomat in 1950s Egypt, finds comfort in the arms of the manager of one of the grandest hotels in Cairo, reawakening a part of her she thought was lost. The experiences of these women as mothers in two different times and places link them together in surprising ways. (Ballantine, June 25)

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Denis Leary’s first name. The article has been corrected.

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The Symbiotic Relationship Between Reading and Writing
Explaining the Symbiotic Relationship Between Reading and Writing. Students who understand how reading relates to writing and vice versa can develop into better writers. For elementary school teachers, the saying is, students learn to read and then read to learn. At the middle and high school levels, teachers may experience the relationship of ...
My Relationship with Reading and Writing: a Reflection
Conclusion. In conclusion, the phrase "my relationship with reading and writing" embodies a journey of exploration, growth, and self-discovery. Reading opened doors to new worlds, broadened my perspectives, and enriched my vocabulary. Writing, on the other hand, empowered me to find my voice, share my thoughts, and engage meaningfully with the.
Literacy Narrative Explained
Breaking Down a Literacy Narrative. A literacy narrative is a personalized story of your relationship with language. Not only do literacy narratives discuss memories, but they also walk through a person's discovery, trials and triumphs with reading, writing and speaking a language. This doesn't have to be English either.
Personal Essay: My Relationship With Reading
Personal Essay: My Relationship With Reading. 1181 Words5 Pages. Throughout my life I have had an interesting relationship with reading. I remember that when I first started learning to read I struggled a bit and absolutely dreaded it. Once I got the hang of things, I started to enjoy reading and would read at any chance I would get.
Personal Literacy Narrative: My Relationship with Reading and Writing
Moreover, it develops my way of reading and writing increasingly. In my personal literacy narrative essay I will share the examples of the role of literacy in my life. Personal Literacy Narrative Essay From prior experiences, I always favor reading over writing. While reading, I can imagine and imply myself into whatever I'm diving into.
My Relationship With Reading
604 Words. 3 Pages. Open Document. James Patterson perfectly sums up my lengthy, arduous, and ever-changing relationship with reading. "There is no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books." As I grow older, and come to appreciate the influence that words have over the ...
How to Write a Literacy Narrative
To be "literate" implies the ability to decode language on its most basic terms, but literacy also expands to one's ability to "read and write" the world — to find and make meaning out of our relationships with texts, ourselves, and the world around us. At any given moment, we orbit language worlds. Soccer players, for example, learn the language of the game.
Essays About Reading: 5 Examples And Topic Ideas
Writing about a book that had a significant impact on your childhood can help you form an instant connection with your reader, as many people hold a childhood literature favorite near and dear to their hearts. 5. Catcher In The Rye: That Time A Banned Book Changed My Life By Pat Kelly.
1.2: Why Read and Write About Literature?
Benefits of Literature. Studies show reading literature may help. promote empathy and social skills (Castano and Kidd) alleviate symptoms of depression (Billington et al.) business leaders succeed (Coleman) prevent dementia by stimulating the mind (Thorpe) These are just a few of the studied benefits of literature.
My Evolving Relationship with Reading and Writing
My Evolving Relationship with Reading and Writing. This essay details the experience of learning to read and write as a child and then growing up and learning literary analysis and how the different approaches come together. The writer uses lots of creative imagery to convey meaning and develop ideas. This essay received a B by one of Kibin's ...
My Relationship With Reading And Writing
993 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. If I could describe my relationship with reading and writing it would most likely have to be, improving. Of course I would assume the same happens to all students that their reading and writing skills improve as they continue with their education. For me reading has been a passion, so my reading skills are ...
Literacy Narrative: My Development In Reading And Writing: [Essay
To conclude my literacy narrative essay, I can say there is not an exact moment or just one single person that I can pinpoint that has helped me on this long journey through my relationship with literacy, because there are just too many, but somehow along the way of my 17-year existence, I gained much information, which has landed me here.
Reading
Some sample reading goals: To find a paper topic or write a paper; To have a comment for discussion; To supplement ideas from lecture; To understand a particular concept; To memorize material for an exam; To research for an assignment; To enjoy the process (i.e., reading for pleasure!). Your goals for reading are often developed in relation to ...
The Relationship Between Reading and Writing
Basically put: reading affects writing and writing affects reading. According to recommendations from the major English/Language Arts professional organizations, reading instruction is most effective when intertwined with writing instruction and vice versa. Research has found that when children read extensively they become better writers.
Reading And Writing Relationship Essay
Decent Essays. 262 Words. 2 Pages. Open Document. My relationship with writing and reading can be vague at times. I was a vivid reader growing up. Reading was the most fulfilling food (rhetorically speaking) for my imagination. I believe writing and reading play two important roles combined for myself. Reading gives me a glimpse into the ...
Reading and Writing Over My Younger Years: My Personal Narrative
This literacy narrative essay describes my journey in reading and writting. Over my younger years, my concern and attraction regarding reading and writing have changed from time to time. I recollect my mother reading bedtime stories to me as a child and painting images to the words she was saying.
How Can We Take Advantage of the Reading-Writing Relationship
Research finds that writing about what one is trying to learn from text is beneficial. Often when students read for a test, they read and reread and hope for the best. Studies show that reading and writing summaries, analyses/critiques, or syntheses of the information has a powerful and positive impact on learning.
A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WHAT A PERSON READS and what that person then writes seems so obvious as to be truistic. And current research and theory about writing have been content to leave the relationship as a truism, making no serious attempt to define either mechanisms or consequences of the interplay between reading and writing. The lack of attention to this essential bond of literacy results ...
I Reread a Book That Changed My Life, but I'd Changed, Too
Reading to them, I remembered the little girl I was, sometimes welling over with feelings too big to express, who would close the door to her room and read the ending of "Charlotte's Web" again.
PDF A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model
COLLEGE ENGLISH. Vol. 41, No. 6 * February 1980. 656. A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model 657. still find the model attractive, because writing in content disciplines requires mas- tery of disciplinary literature. The accumulated knowledge and accepted forms of writing circumscribe what and how a student may ...
How to Develop a Love of Reading in Students
Allow them to make predictions, make connections, and ask questions before every reading experience to gauge their knowledge. These three comprehension strategies inform a teacher of the students' proficiency about a particular topic. Encourage readers to use the title and pictures to make a prediction about what the book is about before ...
relationship with reading essay
Some bring laughter to my lips or consolation to my heart. Others teach me to know myself." Francesco Petrarca This sentence by Francesco Petrarca is an excellent summary of my relationship with reading. Reading is a vital experience that, through the encounter with the intimate world of the writer, allows you to enrich and redesign yourself.
Elisa Gabbert's 'Any Person Is the Only Self' brims with curiosity
Elisa Gabbert's essays in "Any Person Is the Only Self" are brimming with pleasure and curiosity about a life with books. Tell people you read and write for a living, and they picture a ...
Narrative My Relationship With Reading and Writing Essay
Essay. Pages: 4 (1326 words) · Bibliography Sources: 0 · File: .docx · Level: College Senior · Topic: Teaching. ¶ …. Narrative. My Relationship with Reading and Writing. It's spring of my kindergarten year. Everyone else knows all of their ABCs; many of my classmates were reading rudimentary picture books on their own and a few could ...
How My Love of Reading Helped Me Discover Cities Around the World
Courtesy Brianna Bell. Maybe all readers are explorers. We open a book and wade into unknown territory: a historical battle, a family vacation ripe with tension, a land of magic, thrilling deep ...
My Evolving Relationship with Writing
My relationship with writing has been an emotional rollercoaster, with soaring highs and disheartening lows. However, by some chance it has led me to where I'm at today, and for that I am most happy. I first started writing in elementary school. Like the other students, my writing was pretty basic and rudimentary.
Essays About Relationships: Top 5 Examples Plus 8 Prompts
Through interviews, one finds that relationships can happen when you least expect them. You might also be interested in these essays about reflection. 3. Why Adult Children Cut Ties with their Parents by Sharon Martin. "Parent-child relationships, in particular, are expected to be unwavering and unconditional.
How the U.S.'s European Allies Are Preparing for a Second Trump Term
In 2017, when Trump took office, only three allies, plus the U.S., were spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. This year, that number is expected to rise to at least 18. Trump's ...
How New York's Congestion Pricing System Could Have Been Saved
Governor Hochul could have addressed these issues over the nearly three years that she has been in office. She could have reduced congestion pricing's $1-billion-a-year revenue requirement ...
New books to read in June
Sanchez's powerful first novel follows a young boy from Colombia to the United States and back again as he struggles with abandonment issues, acclimating to a new homeland and grappling with his ...