Mike Bunn poses some various ways to read in his article “How to Read Like a Writer” in an example in which he mentions ways to read like an architect or carpenter based on past experiences. Based on your own powerful personal experiences and interests, in which ways have you learned to read? Using examples from the reading, how could you use your experiences to strengthen your writing prowess further?
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Based on my own powerful personal experiences and interests, I have learned to read in different ways than how I used to. I have learned to connect with the readings. When reading, I often tend to put myself in the author’s point of view and act as if I am the main character. Therefore when I do this, I tend to get a better understanding of the story. For example, if the main character is walking through a field, I will paint an image in my head based on my prior experiences of walking through fields in order to try and connect with the story as much as possible. I also use my experiences and interests to try and connect with the character’s emotions. If I am reading a book and one of the characters is going through something I have gone through, I will easily be able to relate to the character and the story’s mood. This connection can also help with writing. Connections can boost your creativity and confidence when writing since it allows you to build a special connection with the story.
When I first thought about the statement “read like a writer” I thought, read like a creative that’s reading an artist’s creation. As a writer, you put your emotion, motive, and passion into your work so if you keep that in mind as you read you can truly understand and appreciate points and techniques a writer uses in their work. In Mike Bunn’s article, “How to Read Like A Writer” author and professor, Wendy Bishop recalls her change in reading and states, “It wasn’t until I claimed the sentence as my area of desire, interest, and expertise—until I wanted to be a writer writing better—that I had to look underneath my initial readings.” It isn’t until you adopt the art of writing, and relate to one’s desire to convey their emotion that you can actually immerse into a passage and read like a writer.
Due to my interests, I spend quite a large portion of my time reading a good amount. Seeing the “Read like a Writer” title, originally, gave me the impression straight away that, from previous experience, the essay would be just another emptier lecture based upon stepping into the shoes of the person who’s story you’re reading to understand it. However, I can fairly say that I did develop the way I analyze the information from reading this and thinking about it a little more, which was due to the actual laws that should be followed while doing RLW. Placing myself through the authors perspective and over thinking everything being told through any amount of literary devices (with examples such as imagery, hyperboles, metaphors and more) gave more of an insight than what was surface level. Understanding something through what you can relate to is a much easier and more effective way of understanding someone’s story or narrative and what they are trying to convey. Realistically everyone has a much deeper story than what is shown to everyone and our flaws are what separate us from each other, which also is very evident in writing. It’s more of an expression of character once you read between the lines, as you see specific word choice and identifying characteristics that really define an author/writer and their style. Keeping this in mind, I can tie in this fact and the fact that every word and even the effort put into the work itself is an example of character to raise my writing capabilities as my own form of storytelling.
In Mike Bunn’s article, how to read like a writer made me realise how much I don’t really pay attention to what I’m reading. Whenever I have to read something I have to go over it multiple times because I wasn’t really paying attention from the beginning. A quote that helped me better understand a sentence was “The goal as you read like a writer is to locate what you believe are the most important writerly choices represented in the text—…..” ,“choices as large as the overall structure or as small as a single word used only once—to consider the effect of those choices on potential readers….” I believe this saying is that taking the entire sentence or taking words from the sentence and analyzing what the author wrote could help you understand what the author is trying to portray. I now feel that I could analyze a sentence and attempt to understand the author’s purpose of their articles.
My own experience of learning to read was to try to put myself in the character’s shoes. I try to imagine events happening in the story as if they were happening to me. To read like a writer you need to identify the choices that the author makes. The text states that reading like a writer can improve your own writing. “When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing”. As long as I continue to “read like a writer” I can apply the same techniques for my own writing.
Based on my own powerful personal experiences and interests, some ways I have learned to read is by visualizing and analyzing. When I read something I tend to visualize the story by using some imagination, I imagen myself as the main character of the story by doing this it makes the story interesting and I am able to understand the emotions that the author is trying to share. Also when reading I tend to analyze and take note I usually do this when I read an article, this helps me by understanding the main points and if I do not understand something from that reading I usually write questions. I strengthen my writing prowess further by trying to figure out how different text are constructed from different writing so I can learn how to build one. “When you read like a writer, you are trying to figure out how the text you are reading was constructed so that you learn how to ‘build’ one for yourself” to strengthen my writing I should read to find how authors built their stories.
In Mike Bunns article he explains how reading like a writer is to put ourselves in the shoes of the author of the book we are reading. He tells us to think about all the things that we would’ve done differently and what adjustments we would’ve made if we were in control. He tells us that we are already authors ourselves. This means that we as teenagers/young adults have a lot of experience with writing. It’s true! Most of us write texts, resumes, speeches, etc. He wants to make sure that we know that to be an author doesn’t mean to have a famous book published. We are all authors in our own way. Personally, the things that I have written have been text messages, resumes, power points, and even short stories when I am bored. All these will help my writing abilities because practice makes perfect and all those types of writings will help me better my ability to write for college and beyond that. This article made me see that I need to start asking myself a lot more questions when reading anything, “why did the author do this?”, ” why is this being said? Does it have any significance?”, ” Should I remember this piece of information?”. I always thought that there were things that authors wrote that were just put there to make the pages longer but it seems like everything in writing has significance to something. I would also like to try and put myself in the author’s position and see what I would do differently if I had control over whatever I was reading so I could understand why the author made what happened happen.
For a majority of my life I’ve always had my head in some writing piece a newspaper article, conspiracy theory blog or book. For a long time I’ve read so I can gain knowledge or to simply enjoy the storyline the author created. When I was in my preteen years I got in to my head that I wanted to be a writer, to actually sit down and create a whole book. I started to read differently then, I learned to pinpoint my favorite parts in a book and tried to imitate them. I wanted to know how the writer was able to elicit those feelings and what methods they used that allowed to create such experience for me. A quote that resonated with me from Bunn’s article was “When you read like a writer, you are trying to figure out how the text you are reading was constructed so that you learn how to “build one for yourself.”” It made me realize how one’s writing is always evolving, no matter how many writing pieces you read there is always something more to gain than just the knowledge of the piece itself. Like a puzzle, all these writings come with a piece and can come together to complete your own personal writing.
I love reading, till I was 12 I read as a reader, only for entertainment. I could read a whole book in a day but wouldn’t be able to process all the emotions the author wanted to express. I would forget the entire thing after a couple of weeks. This caused my writing level to be lower than my classmates, till I met my 6th-grade teacher. In China, 6th grade is included as an elementary school. She’s a very patient teacher. She wouldn’t easily blame us like other teachers. She noticed that I read a lot and practice a lot but still couldn’t do well on reading comprehension and essays. (we do a lot of essay and reading comprehension, at least 2 per day). She didn’t tell me directly what to do to improve, but asked me about the last book I read: how do you feel about this book. I was left dazed for a moment. I realized I am not able to give her a response. This is when I become aware that when I read any paragraphs, I’m like a machine. The words just travel across in the left and out the right. Because of this, I started to change. From that time on, when I read most of the time, I ask myself two things; what is this book about? What is the structure of this book? I will have a notebook that I would use to jot down all the words and phrases I think is vital to learn and try to include them in my writing. I will try to imagine a situation that I can use that phrase on.
At first when I read the title “How to Read Like A Writer” I thought about certain techniques the author might give us to read a book and put ourselves in the position of the characters and see how we can relate to them. As I was reading the article, I read that we must put ourselves in the position of the author and “look at a book the way a carpenter would look at a house someone else built, examining the details in order to see how it was made.” The questions in the article showed me how different I read in comparison to Reading Like A Writer. Based on my personal experiences I always put myself in the eyes of the main character. Since fiction books were the genre I usually read, being in the position of the main character usually made it interesting. Once I read the rest of the article it showed how when RWL you can experience the book from a different perspective. Instead of asking what happened in the story, we can ask why it happened and why the author chose to make those decisions for the characters.
What does it mean to read like a writer? Given that statement, based on my experiences reading, I would have to say to read like a writer would mean that you would annotate the text to get a deeper understanding of the context and also try to find symbolism in some of the writer’s words. In the RLW text he states, “When we read like writers we understand and participate in the writing. We see the choices the writer has made” this demonstrates the reader’s ability to analyze the text and feel connected and a part of the reading.
When asked the question, “what does it mean to read like a writer?” the first thing that comes to mind is the type of mindset. I remember during middle school my teacher use to tell us to write out as if we were reading it to someone. Try to incorporate your imagination and creativity, express with detail to catch the reader’s attention. So to the reader, it would make them feel like part of the story, almost like if they were the writer reading with detail the story. As a quote in the chapter, How to Read Like a Writer
by Mike Bunn states, ” Does it make it feel like a real person, some
“ordinary guy,” is talking to you? Does it draw you into the essay and
make you want to keep reading?” This would mean reading with thought and attention to what the writer wants you to feel and think.
I personally never enjoyed reading, which might sound crazy. My lack of interest turned me into a terrible writer and made it hard for me to explain myself in English class due to my small vocabulary. Over the summer I decided to pick up a book and start reading but I went for something I actually really enjoyed. My past English teachers would tell me that I just haven’t found the right book to read. So I took their advice and looked into something I really enjoyed which was true crime. Mike Bunn mentions how you should put yourself in the author’s shoes while reading and it made me feel like I was there in the moment figuring out who had done this heinous crime. I wanted to understand the motive behind the crime and why are some people driven to do these terrible things. Overall, putting myself in the author’s shoes and taking my past teacher’s advice made me more interested in the cause and effect of the crime itself.
Throughout middle school I’ve always been taught that the best way to read is to visualize the text as you’re reading and use imagery. I would say that I’ve learned to read greatly by the use of that practice. I also feel that as I’ve taken more rigorous English courses, I’ve learned different ways to analyze and interpret a text and which devices a writer can use to convey certain ideas. In the article “How to Read Like a Writer” the author explains that as you read you pick up on the techniques of the writer and decipher how you can implement those strategies into your own writing. I believe that through different reading experiences such as reading a peers work you can see different techniques and sometimes even adopt some of them.
Im going to be real i have no real idea what it means to read like a writer. in school i used to like to books when the topic was cool or if the cover looked interesting i always chose a book by its cover it has never faliled me yet. i was never a strong writer or speller in school even my hand writing is horrible i always use spell check. i have no idea how to use it on this school computer. my writing will defentily suffer. what i think it means to think like a writer is how to analyes a text and how the text makes you feel at the end of the day. but base on my experince i dont think theres anything that can make me a better writer hell i can bearly spell most words proply. to be honest this was alwasy my worst subject. i alwasy have to write like 4 drafts for my work to be accectable in class. even based on the reading i personaly think these stragites work for me. also dont be surpried if im your littlar worst student.