Category: Unit 1

Mike Bunn speaks to the reader through his article, “How to Read Like an Author. How Authors have unique writing styles and methods, just as we as students do in our essays or write in our personal lives. We have our own way of writing and express ourselves in our writing, for example. I express my writing through the essays that I’ve written over the past years, text messages, and handwritten cards that I have sent to my family and friends. Getting either my point through or information. With that existing expertise, it can help me through my college reading and writing career by taking the skills that I’ve learned in the past and present. When reading, I can annotate and take any section and paraphrase it in a way that I’ll be able to understand. While writing, I can try to make it informative by using the right words to get my point across. One thing that I noticed in Bunn’s article that I’ll like to try in my writing is to ask myself more questions about who the author is trying to direct it to so I can have an idea in my head to be able to understand from the author’s first-person point of view.

Mike Bunn expresses in his article that “You are already an author”. Bunn means that we, as readers, develop our writing skills as we read a form of writing. While reading, we can learn about the author’s choices that they made for their writing and learn about techniques that you can use in your own writing. These techniques can help you connect more to your writing yourself, as well as other readers. An example seen in the text is when the author describes in detail the building in which he worked. He illustrates The Palace as “a beautiful red brick, four-story theatre” in the heart of London’s famous West End. This is a great example of a choice he made as a writer and we, as readers, can learn from it. This means that as we read, we are already becoming authors. I already write a lot of things in my everyday life. Writing is a crucial form of communication that I need every day to communicate. I communicate with my friends, family, and myself through writing. Even through texting, writing is important. Even texts have tones and the words that you choose can impact others. Besides communicating with others, I also use writing to communicate with myself. Every night I write in my journal. I to myself about my feelings, and write positive affirmations. This helps me connect with myself and feel more motivated. Besides communication, I also use my writing for daily to-do lists. This helps me keep track of the things I need to do in advance and not get behind. This will help me in my college reading and writing career to stay organized with my thoughts. Since I like to keep track of my ideas in writing, I will be able to annotate them in my notebook so that in the future I know what I want to write about and have my ideas ready. I will also be able to use my annotation skills to better understand other people’s writing and learn more writing techniques. 

A good writing technique I would like to incorporate into my own writing is to ask questions to the readers. For example, Bunn states: “I started asking, how—how did the writer get me to feel, how did the writer say something so that it remains in my memory when many other things too easily fall out.” Using questions in your writing can help readers and writers learn more about themselves and see how they would manage a situation.

What Mike Bunn means is that there are many different authors who use different writing methods and have unique styles, but you are a student and you have written papers for your assignments and outside too, you make writing choices on your own papers for your audience. When writing a paper you make word choices, you have a purpose for your choices and you might be inspired by other authors’ pages you have read from and maybe adapt their techniques. Some things I’ve been writing are essays. They are a part of the  English language classes so I’ve written different topic essays and they have helped build in my writing skills. In our everyday lives we use words for many different things such as describing a place, communicating/interacting with others, to describe a feeling or in this modern world you use words to write texts to people, or to send emails. My experience with writing will help me in my reading and writing career because I have my personal way of writing and reading to understand things, I would be able to write professional emails or even communicate with peers, I would be able to make my topics interesting enough that it will attract readers and help them stay interested while reading to make them want to read more. With what I read I will take into consideration acknowledging the choice of words by the author, try to understand the audience the author may be trying to target, the way the author structures their paragraphs and I’ll pay attention to their writing styles, I will work on staying on topic with my writings and not have run on sentences, specially being more careful with the choices I make while creating my writing. Bunn wrote about introducing your writing with a quote. I would like to try this because I feel like it gives the readers a way of being more interested in reading. It will intrigue the readers into what they should expect the writing they are going to read to be about.