The concept of reading like a writer is both an easy and hard concept to show how to do. On the one hand, it’s easy because you can just tell people different ways you can read like a writer, for example, to look for a sentence structure, a theme, and the authors emotions. And on the other hand, it is difficult to explain because every story or book or article is different from one another by using and showing different techniques and styles of reading and writing. This author (of the article) does a well enough job of explaining how to read like a writer, for us to get the main points and things you can do to read like a writer. Although it might not seem like it, you are picking up and learning new writing techniques shown by the author every time you read a story, this can be shown through obvious or minimalistic techniques of writing. Each author is different from one another (even though some do use others techniques); they each have their own “brand” or “style” of writing and telling a story. When you start reading like a writer, you start to see more than what’s on the surface; this author explains it as, “trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what can be learned about writing by reading a particular text.” -(Mike Bunn, “How To Read Like A Writer,” Pg. 72, Line 10-12.)
When you read like a writer, you have the ability to put yourself in the “authors shoes,” and see through their perspective on what they are writing and what/why they make the choices in their writing that they do. The goal when you are in this perspective is to find the most important choices that the writer makes that is represented in the article or piece of a text. I think that when I read through this article more and more, I pick up on the little/subtle writing techniques that this particular author chooses to use. For example the spacing of paragraphs when he makes a main point, the line breaks, and the wording that he uses when describing something. Discussing this article in class definently brought some aspects, in which I hadn’t recognized, to the table. For example we came up with some different interpretations of what the article was trying to get across (obviously how to read like a writer, but deeper than that). For me, in general, I read assigned articles a lot differently than books that I read for fun. I tend to just read through it and pick out main ideas for the assigned piece, or whatever the assignment asks for. For the books, I tend to read it through the voice and perspective of the main characters (and all of the other characters if they have first person lines) and get a picture of what the environment is based on how it is described in the story. Sometimes if a book is based on a movie or vice versa, I look up what the actors/actresses look like and use that as the imagined look of the character in the book.
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