Connections- My first connection I made was a text to self connection. The reason I chose text to self is because the author had mentioned how the theater was a hard place to read, and he had to reread many sentences over and over again to finally understand them, I felt that because some days, reading is so difficult. Yeah, I see the words, and can say them but actually understanding the context, and taking something away from the article can be extremely challenging, therefore I made that connection. The other connection I made was when he mentioned how knowing ahead of time what kind of writing you will be doing can really help you read a certain way, and I picked up on that because that’s exactly what I’m doing for this assignment, that’s what I’m doing right now. When Bonnie gives us articles, we know what to look for while reading. I’m looking for connections, and main ideas while others are looking to summarize the article, so we all read things a different way depending on what we’re doing.

Commentary- When the author first mentioned dropping the idea of reading for content, or deeper understanding of a subject, and instead said to read the words to understand how it was written, made me a little worried because it sounds somewhat complex, and on a whole different level of reading I have no idea how to doso that stuck out to me. Another comment I have is about when he went on with his rant of questions, it made me think he was analyzing the purpose, but again on a different level. I say this because usually, when we analyze something so strictly, we kind of say “ok what does this writer want US to get from the reading?” But it’s the opposite here, we’re questioning how they did it, how they formed this piece, why did they do what they did? etc. and it’s kind of backwards thinking in my opinion.

Main idea/ Key points- One big overall thing I took away from this is when the author said something along the lines of “reading word-for-word may be how the author wrote the article”(72) and that kind of puts things into perspective, and putting it into those terms may help students, or just people in general understand what RLW means so I put that down as a key point. Another statement that caught my eye wasn’t exactly a key word, but rather a main idea in question form. “Would you want to try this technique in your own writing?”(73) I picked that because it kind of sums up the idea of did what this author do intrigue you? Did it work for you the way they intended it to work? Because that’s simply how you know if this play on words per say has accomplished what it needed to accomplish. One last main idea was always keeping your audience in mind. I feel as long as its not creative, personal writing, it’s a good idea to keep your audience in the back of your head, put yourself in their shoes, and just target them like crazy. Get them going, see what like and strongly dislike, learn about them and study them, because that way, you can write to their satisfaction, and keep them coming back for more.