Reading is a very important part of writing because in reading one can learn how to write. This is because it is easy to build one’s knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and style by reading what others have written.
I have always been an avid reader and although I would not say I have excellent vocabulary or grammar skills, I have definitely improved those skills through reading endless amounts and types of books. My love for reading even encouraged me to explore writing before I became passionate about and decided to major in graphic design.
In Bunn’s “How to Read Like a Writer” he says on page 72 that “When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing.” I agree with this because when I write, I tend to mimic the writing style found in the books I’m currently reading. I maintain my own writing style, but because those styles are fresh in my mind I incorporate them with my own. This is especially true if I’ve read something and the particular way that it is written has really struck me as interesting, persuasive, or profound. Bunn mentions this as well when he says “…you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader.” If a certain writing technique stands out to me, I will most likely try it in my own writing the next time I find a proper place to use it.
I like how Bunn describes RLW as “Reading Like an Architect” because one is “reading to see how something was constructed so that you can construct something similar yourself.”
Rosenberg begins “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” by explaining exactly how I feel when I read text books that are just straight facts without a story line or at least facts that I find to be interesting. I like that she suggests that reading these texts is not just reading, it is “participating in a conversation.” She proves that reading is important to writing because if one has to write a paper on something he or she has read, one must go about reading that text in a particular way to extract the necessary information for the paper.
Rosenberg identifies asking questions and finding clues in one’s syllabus and classroom discussions as criteria for narrowing down one’s focus when reading a particular text. She stresses the importance of having goals before opening a scholarly text so as not to get lost in one’s own thoughts instead of focusing on understanding and extracting information from the book. I like these suggestions because having goals always helps me to remain focused on the task at hand, whatever it may be. I have just never applied that focusing technique to reading scholarly texts. She also identifies the audience, the title, the introduction, the section headings, conclusion and the main argument or idea as points in a text that readers should pay especially close attention to in order to make one’s reading experience into a conversation instead of a passive, solitary activity.
