Reading Like A Writer

The concept of Reading like a Writer, as introduced by Mike Bunn, makes a lot of sense to me. I am a writer, mostly of non-fiction, poetry, and literary analysis, and I find that I often am looking at texts from that perspective. If I am reading something I really like, I try to look at what about the author's writing- structurally or content-wise or stylistically on a sentence level - is working, or drawing me to it. My most recent creative writing teacher introduced us to the concept of energy- just our natural response to any piece of writing. Where do we start to feel something? Where does it pick up? When you start to look for these kinds of things, you start to catalog what seems to work. Then your mind wonders why, and you are on the path to discovering something about writing.

Even looking at it just from a reader's perspective, as Bunn does, the concept does a lot to illuminate analytical and critical reading. If you look at a text from a rhetorician's standpoint, understanding how the argument of a particular piece works, what strategies he or she is using, you can read more critically. Are you being duped? You are probably being duped anyway, but, are they going about it artfully? Does the tone of the writing convince you? I liked that Bunn said you should think about the intended purpose and audience for a text, for, if you are reading critically, it is important to know from what sort of angle you critique should come. For example, you wouldn't want to read someone's personal essay with the same critical eye as you would a presidential speech.

In reading like a writer, some of the important questions I think about are:
Where is the writing unclear?
Where is it confident?
What is the purpose of this (metaphor, anecdote, aside)?
Why is the piece structured in this way?