Williams 151-170

Williams raises the question of how correcting a child while they are reading aloud is detrimental to their comprehension of the reading. This is perhaps the first place that students learn to edit while writing therefore hindering their writing process. While it is important for students to be able to correctly read and identify words, it falls on the teacher to know how to correct a student without sacrificing their ability to comprehend the words that they are reading. "If reading proceeds too slowly, comprehension becomes extremely difficult, and error correction, by its very nature, slows reading down." (pg. 159) The same can be said for a writer who stops and ponders word choice or spelling therefore sacrificing a train of thought that could have turned their writing into a thoughtful and fully developed piece of work instead of a paper free from errors but also free from any useful meaning or content.

"...Once [children] reach the toddler stage parents expect them to begin communicating through speech, and gestures are no longer as readily acceptable as communicative acts." (pg 151) In my experience as a parent, the stage in which a child is able to verbalize a limited amount of communication leads to frustration for the child. The child knows what he wants to communicate and failed attempts to effectively communicate their needs to the parents cause the child to throw a tantrum, for example. This reminds me of a writer in their early stages. The writer knows what she wants to communicate, the thoughts are in her head and she can even verbalize her thought process, but when it comes to writing these thoughts down on paper, oftentimes, the written words do not do justice to what the writer was attempting to communicate.

On a completely different note, I took note to an error in Williams' reasoning on page 166, where he was discrediting Krashen's "reading hypothesis proposal", in which Krashen asserts that "all good writing will have done large amounts of pleasure reading." Williams asserts that "Some of the worst writers comes from university professors, all of whom are well read." Williams fails to take into account that Krashen's proposal states "pleasure reading" and there is no evidence to suggest that all university professors read for pleasure. I don't necessarily disagree with Krashen but I feel that Williams' argument is a bit weak on this particular stance.