In my opinion, writing is not a skill that students learn separate from other processes

In my opinion, writing is not a skill that students learn separate from other processes. It combines many complex activities, including categorizing, building key terms and concepts for a subject, measuring one's reaction to a subject, making new connections, abstracting, figuring out significance, and developing arguments to name a few. Our highest cognitive functions are developed and supported through active and interconnected use of language speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

In practice, this means that reading (and speaking and listening) can be used as a springboard for writing projects, and writing can be used as a way to understand reading. A variety of informal, often ungraded, writing activities may be used, for instance, to help students understand that critical reading can be practiced through writing about reading and that writing projects can be strengthened through careful, critical reading. Actual classroom practices can be designed so that students use writing to read and reading to write. Writing courses consistently provide such integrated activities for students; however, in First Year Seminars and content-area courses, reading and writing can also be practiced together and sequenced effectively to support the learning experience.

Academic writers are, therefore, usually driven by an engagement with the topic and with a sense that they are well contributing to an ongoing conversation. Students who are new to this process are often afraid of it because their expectation is that in order to be good, their writing has to be good immediately. One of the things they need to learn is that writing as a process means work.

Academic readers, therefore, understand that reading is a process often requiring rereading or slow reading and that a difficult passage may become clearer as they continue reading. Good readers are not necessarily "speed" readers, though often students believe this is the case.