Micro-Activity # 2: Responding to Bunn

As a reader, even though I enjoy reading at times, I often lose focus very easily if I am not interested in what I am reading. I like to engage in short stories, one of my favorites being The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. I enjoy reading books/stories that keep me wondering “what will happen next?”. When read I often catch myself looking for a quiet place, some people are able to read anywhere, I’m not. As a writer i would consider myself a good writer, especially if I am told what format to use. One challenge that i face when writing is not being able to put my thoughts on paper. I have what I want to say in the back of my head, however I just cant seem to write it down. Another challenge that I face when writing is wondering “could I have used a better word”. For example “should i have used the word classify instead of categorize”

One moment that I found useful when reading Mike Bunn that I would like to try as a reader is when he talks about the different genres a text can be written in. “Because the conventions for each genre can be different, techniques that can be effective for one genre may not work well in another”. This is useful to me because it helps me to understand that just because i use one technique to read a poem does not mean the same technique will be useful when I am trying to read an instruction manual. Bunn begins his articles on page 71 by giving background information about his job and what he had to do. I believe Bunn decided to start off this way to show the conditions he had to read in, how they were difficult and not the best reading conditions. For example he says he had to use a tiny flashlight along with all the noise that was coming from the stage, he would often have to reread the same sentence over and over and sometimes the entire paragraph. So questions to think about is what is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do? and how does the technique I am using depend on the text I am reading?

When Morrison says reading as a skill vs reading as an art I believe she meant that there are two different styles of reading. I believe she means when you read as a skill you understand what you have read and what the author is trying to convey. However when you read as an art you discover the deeper meaning of what you read. “like the avid devotion to other arts, it develops over time in any number of ways, takes all sorts of routes, and has many origins”. This shows how when you read as an art there is greater and deeper thinking process that occurs in the reader.