ABSTRACT
In Covering, civil rights scholar Kenji Yoshino describes his friendship in college with a young woman who shared his Asian-American background and his love for British literature: “Our evenings were filled with the happiness of people learning to read, to write. We read to each other from opposite ends of a couch, like a two-headed disputatious literary creature” (121). What’s most striking about this account (besides his peculiar notion of a good time) is Yoshino’s claim that he learned to read and write in college. A graduate of Exeter, a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire, and Harvard, Yoshino obviously knew how to read and write very well before college. When he claims to have learned these skills at Harvard, he’s speaking about a particular type of reading and writing. There are many different kinds of reading and writing because we engage in these activities for a wide variety of purposes. Reading and writing personal texts (such as journals, memoirs, letters, or blogs) can enhance self-understanding and deepen our sense of connection to others. Ad copy creates desire for consumer goods and services. Academic reading and writing—the subject of Yoshino’s memories of Harvard—involve a process of active inquiry and meaning construction that’s diametrically opposed to passive conceptions of “receiving” knowledge. This kind of reading and writing requires that you morph into a “disputatious” (or questioning) creature as Yoshino did at Harvard. The goal of this chapter is to help you to understand and achieve this metamorphosis.
