Reading Like a Writer Should Be

Reading like a Writer Should Be

Reading like a writer can sometimes not be the easiest thing to do but if you take the time to read through it thoroughly you will be able to understand why the writer uses that way of thinking. Most of the time you read in order to learn how to write or how the author writes. For instance, they say “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” ( Bunn 72). For me there was always one book in particular that I was able to grasp was “Blood on the River” by Elisa Carbone. I had read this book over and over again and was able to understand the author’s writing style. For a bit of background to understand it’s about a boy named Samuel Collier an orphan on the streets of London picked up by Captain John Smith on the Mayflower expedition to the New World. Mainly it’s centered on Virginia mostly as is gathered from a collection of records, letters, reports and all sorts of other information from those times. Mainly the author was trying to convey the story from the perspective of one of the colonialists and try to tell the story to as much detail as she could. Trying to give the reader the best told story even if some of it were not from the people themselves. This form is one of two ways we can read like a writer. Though another way we can interpret it is to read at the book as a whole from concrete details in the writing to get an overall view of what the author is trying to convey to the reader. Also since there was not too many people at the time that this book was published that did do in depth research on the colonists themselves rather where the sites they lived on. Elisa Carbone was trying to convey to the reader’s what the colonists life was like during those tough and tumbling days during the early colonization of Europeans in the region. You learn to read like a writer by attempting to understand the ideas and the concepts they when writing these stories to the best of your ability. For instance, “We see the choices the writer has made, and we see how the writer has coped with the consequences of those choices” (Bunn 75). This quote means the way the writer writes it based on his choices can also affect the way we read the story and can change drastically based on the author’s choice. Reading like a writer can sometimes be difficult to interpret but we eventually understand them over time and develop our own sense of understanding as we continue to both read and write on our own.

 

 

Works Cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Vol. 1. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor P, 2010. 71-86. Writing Spaces. Web. 2 Feb. 2016.