Juan Diego Parada, Discussion of “How to read like a writer”

In ‘How to Read like a Writer,’ one aspect that I found helpful was when the author said, ‘As I struggled to read in this environment, I began to realize that the way I was reading—one word at a time—was exactly the same way that the author had written the text. I realized writing is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process. The intense concentration required to read in the theater helped me recognize some of the interesting ways that authors string words into phrases into paragraphs into entire books.’ I feel that my reading and writing processes are similar in English. The thing is, when I write or read in English, many times I need to check many words and their meanings because English is not my first language. So I usually read word by word to get an idea of what the author means.