Week 1: Course Overview & Annotating Texts
For Monday:
No reading or writing to do in advance: it’s the first day of class!
For Wednesday:
Forms:
- Fill out “Student Survey”
Texts:
- Read “How to Read like a Writer” by Mike Bunn.
- Review “RWL” (Reading like a Writer) Power Point by Laura Westengard.
Writing:
- Write a short paragraph responding to the Bunn essay: identify one specific moment you found useful and you want to try out as a reader. Quote or paraphrase this moment, and explain why this idea appeals to you. Post as reply here.
- Type up and send your beginning diagnostic (that we will do in class on Monday) to me via email.
Normally when I read a book, essay, or even a news article I gravitate towards reading and comprehending the material as quickly as possible. The faster I read the text, the faster I can write down my thoughts and move on to a different subject. Thinking about why the author used “fondness” over “love” or why he/she started the essay with a joke instead of a statistic or fact was unprecedented to me. When asking others for advice on how to become a better writer the most common answer you will receive is to read more books. They preach that reading books will “improve your writing skills” but they don’t go into depth on how it can take your writing to the next level. Fortunately, after reading the essay “How To Read Like A Writer” I learned different ways to use authors’ writing techniques and choice of words into my own writing pieces. The most useful advice I learned from reading this essay is that before picking up a text, you must know the context of the material you are reading. “Do you know the author’s purpose of writing this piece? Do you know who the intended audience is for this piece of writing?” (Bunn, 7). These questions are questions I should be asking myself before I start reading. Learning the purpose of the text and who it is intended for helps me understand why the author uses a certain technique, phrase, or vocabulary. This idea appeals to me because it helps me find new ways to improve my writing just by reading someone else’s. In my future writing pieces I will be able to adapt to a specific audience, know the right things to say to grab their attention, and most importantly make sure they enjoy reading my work.
RLW is a useful way of analyzing and understanding the writing in full depth and implement that analysis in your writing. The quote, “You’re not going to just read a text. You’re going to read a text within a certain context, a set of circumstances . . . It’s one kind of writing or another, designed for one audience and purpose or another” by Professor Richard Straub resonates with me because I can relate. When I first read “Master and Margarita”, I didn’t really understand the meaning of the book and context within it, so i decided to find information about the creation of this writing. I found out a lot of information about Vladimir Bulgakov and understood that there is a lot of reflections of his life in the book. Sometimes the context is lurking somewhere but you have to look everywhere to make meaning of it.
One specific moment that I found useful was portraying reading like a writer from a different lens. Rather than looking at strictly from a readers perspective, I’m allowed to use previous architectural experience to relate in the fact that I would have to look at why and how things were made in order to succeed in my career. Specifically on page 74 paragraph 2 “But if we are interested as architects, we may or may not know about the history of the Corinthian style; we must, however, know all about the construction of the building, down to the last nail or peg in the beams. We have got to know this if we are going to put up buildings ourselves.” Correlating the reading to architecture peaked my interest as that’s the career I’m working towards.
As a reader I never paid much attention to how every word has its sequence. I thought words were written as they flow out one’s mind. As stated by book ,”about the important connections between reading and writing”(pg76,par3). The writer must allows keep in mind the reader or the audience and how words may affect them as it may swing in one way by one group but swing another by others.
One specific moment I found useful was when the author said, “Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text”. This idea appeals to me because when I read pieces of readings or texts, usually just try to read them to find out what the writer is talking about but that doesn’t give me the hundred percent full gist. I want to try this out as a reader because it will help me comprehend the writing much better and make the story way more clearer.
This technique would help me figure out why the author put the story together the way he did. Figuring that out would also help influence how I respond to different readings. Reading to learn about writing would also make me a better writer because I would be able to identify certain phrases and writing techniques I didn’t know about and implicate it in my own © top writing.
Linde Coffie
one specific moment I found useful was when the author quoted on page 72 “I realized writing is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process.” I think that Mike Bunn is trying to tell us readers that the only way to write is by processing it slowly and by understanding what you’re writing you have to read.. Mike Bunn tells us that its a whole progress. this is useful because he also shares his story on how he was an English major in collage and shows us his point of view. He states “I was an English major in college, but I don’t think I ever thought much about reading. I read all the time. I read for my classes and on the computer and sometimes for fun, but I never really thought about the important connections between reading and writing, and how reading in a particular way could also make me a better writer” this quote in the story is useful because he tells us in other words that reading is fundamental.
identify one specific moment you found useful and you want to try out as a reader. Quote or paraphrase this moment, and explain why this idea appeals to you.
I think something that I found useful is using a quote for your writing depending on what I’m writing to get my point better understanding. In the text it states”Do you
think it would be effective to begin your essay with a quote” pg 73 (how to read like a writer) the reason why this applies to me is because they are other people who have the similar idea that I had or it can sum up the things that I was trying to say.
identify one specific moment you found useful and you want to try out as a reader. Quote or paraphrase this moment, and explain why this idea appeals to you.
A moment I found useful and try as a reader is to be able to understand what I’m reading. Reading something and being able to comprehend what you reading are two different things. You read anything and do not understand the point of it or the meaning. You can read and understand what you reading. You can relate or make a connection with it. When I was in high school English there was a time that I had to read and do assignments on plenty of Shakespeare books and it was difficult because I didn’t understand what I was reading. I was so lost. But I started asking questions, rereading the pages that I went over in class, and using SparkNotes. Those are the things that helped me understand those types of books. Once I finally understood I made a lot of connections and was able to summarize a quick paragraph that I read. On page 72 the text says “I read all the time. I read for my classes and on the computer and sometimes for fun, but I never really thought about the important connections between reading and writing, and how reading in a particular way could also make me a better writer.”