As someone who went to school, we have all became authors at some point. In fact, even now I’m authoring this post. And I can say that I’ve penned various argumentative essays, speeches, biographies, scientific reports, and more even though they are of dubious quality. And even beyond that, I used the skills that were taught in English class to write articulate emails and such. And hopefully my shoddy reading comprehension skills allows me to understand how to read and write college stuff.

A part of the text I’d like to utilize myself is the very long dash — like this symbol — that he uses to add another phrase that cannot be added to the sentence itself with a conjunction. I often use parenthesis for this purpose but refrain from using it because it seems a little unprofessional and makes me sound a little snarky so I am glad that I’ve found another way to do so. I also like the way that he adds emphasis using Italics. These techniques gives the text a quality that gives me a vivid auditory hallucination of Billy Joel telling me how to read. Since I already write like I would speak, its nice that I can learn to do it better.

Edit: I just realized that the reason why it sounds so comforting is because this is a how-to for people older than middle school. And the way he describes it is spelt out enough for me to go “Oh yeah” even though I still don’t get it enough to communicate this to someone else. Which he did by adding all these references and (similes? metaphors?). Things I thought that didn’t belong in my writing because it seems too informal.

Also I learned that I annotate like reaction channels react to videos. I should actually learn to annotate better. I’m not sure what I specifically learned from annotating but it did make me learn how to wonder why he had the whole anecdotal bit in the beginning instead of just staring from the part where he hunkered own backstage reading with a small flashlight.