1. What was happening to you, moment by moment, as
you were reading this piece of writing?
|
2. Summarize the writing: give your understanding of
what it says or what happened in it. |
3. Make some images for
the writing and the transaction it creates with readers. |
1.
What was happening to you
as you read the first one or
two paragraphs? |
1.Summarize the writing in thirty seconds. Let the
writer hear you think out loud. |
1.What forms of writing
does it remind you of: e.g., a bureaucratic memo, a
lecture, a story? |
|
2. What
words and phrases stuck out most? |
2.Summarize the writing in a sentence, then a word. |
2.Tell how someone
different from you might react to the piece; e.g., if a
judge read it, if your supervisor, secretary or client
read it. |
|
3.
What ideas, feelings, beliefs do you bring to this piece
that influences way you read it? |
3.Summarize what you feel the writer is trying but not
quite managing to say. |
3.Make an image for the
relationship between the writer and reader. Is the
writer reading from a stage? Shaking a fist? Leading you
down a path? |
|
4. What do
you need or want as a reader? If you're fighting the piece or the
writer, what would it take for you to go with the writer? |
4.Summarize what you wish the writing would say. |
4.What is the writer
trying to do to you? Trap you? Surprise you? Bore you?
Persuade you? Delight you? |
|
5. As you're reading, make marks
to how you're reacting to the words; a straight line next to
passages and words that work, please you; a wiggly line for
parts that bother you. Share these with the writer. |
5.What is this piece not about; what is the opposite of
what it is saying? |
5.Find words or metaphors for the voice or tone in the
writing: authoritative, tight-lipped, conversational?
Like who? Bill Clinton, Judge Judy, Johnnie Cockran,
Oprah Winfrey, Antonio Villaraigosa?Oprah
Winfrey? |
|
6. Point to the passage that you
liked especially, the ones you didn't understand or which made
you stumble or resist. |
|
6.Do you feel a difference
between the voice created or implied by these words and
the actual writer that wrote them? |
|
|
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7.What images of the
writer come to mind? Hunched over a desk? Lounging on
the beach? Preaching from pulpit? |
