Word: readerly
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...like an almost physical experience. Is that a common attitude among writers?BJ: There are so many things about writing that are so mysterious...But there are plenty of things that can be explained. You can really teach someone technique and craft and how to be a more sophisticated reader. Any gift or talent that the writer has will then be augmented. Like you said, it really comes down to being physical.3.FM: In the book you say that you don’t believe in inspiration or that writing can be taught—which sucks...
...necessary to repeatedly point out a certain “Machiavellian” quality he was picking up on in the text. Someone else used the margins of James Joyce’s Dubliners to observe how “very Irish” it all was. And a reader of my German history textbook circled every single word in a wholly unimportant paragraph, and then wrote “Hitler was a man” in the margin...
...It’s the reason our classes make us write papers. The mere specter of a skeptical reader forces us to translate our inchoate thoughts into clear, convincing language. Margin notes, for those who live in fear of posterity’s judgments, are just papers writ small...
...Rather than treating book margins as the receptacles of their unthinking drivel, note-takers should embrace the chastising influence of an absent reader. Those with substantial egos can imagine that reader as a future biographer, while the modest can simply picture a judgmental type like myself, who will publish your stupidities in the student newspaper for all to read...
work and its reader. Still, there are those...