How to Read Like a Writer — Comprehensive Notes

How to Read Like a Writer — Comprehensive Study Notes

Source: Mike Bunn, "How to Read Like a Writer" (essay from Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2)
Core idea: Read like a writer (RLW) to uncover writerly choices in a text, and use those insights to improve your own writing.
Purpose of RLW: Learn how writing is constructed so you can imitate, adapt, or critique techniques in your own work.
Key framing metaphor: Reading like a writer is akin to reading as an architect or carpenter—focusing on construction and choices rather than merely content.
Practical payoff: RLW reveals how writers shape readers’ responses and helps you anticipate effects you may want to achieve in your own writing.

What RLW Is (Definition and Purpose)

RLW asks you to identify and analyze the choices an author makes in a text.
The goal is to understand how those choices arise in your own writing; you read to learn about writing, not just to understand content.
You should consider how the author’s choices influence readers (including you as a reader).
The ultimate aim is to locate the most important writerly choices—ranging from overall structure to a single word—and evaluate their effects on potential readers.
Once identified, imagine alternative choices the author could have made and consider their likely impact.

The Reading Process as a Writer: Personal Anecdote (The Theatre Example)

Bunn’s early experience in London sitting in a dark theatre, reading with a flashlight, taught him that reading one word at a time mirrors how authors string words into larger units.
Insight: Writing is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process, with a series of deliberate choices across sentences, paragraphs, and whole texts.
Consequence: Reading in a demanding environment helped him notice how authorial decisions accumulate to shape meaning and effect.

Why Read Like a Writer?

RLW emphasizes examining the writer’s techniques to understand how writing works, not just to extract content.
Reading like a writer helps you see the processes behind writing—the moves authors make and the consequences those moves have for readers.
Morans’s idea: When we read like writers, we understand and participate in the writing; we see the choices the writer has made and how those choices produce certain effects.
Moran’s claim also notes that prior writing experience helps readers recognize and anticipate those moves.
Practical implication: You are already an author in the sense that your own writing experience gives you a toolkit to notice and evaluate writing choices.

The RLW Framework: Core Concepts and Goals

Identify the most important writerly choices in a text, from broad structure to small word-level choices.
Consider how those choices might influence readers and what alternative choices could yield different reader responses.
Use RLW to inform your own writing decisions, including genre, tone, evidence, and organization.
RLW connects to foundational principles of reading, writing, and rhetoric by treating reading as a productive act aimed at learning how to write better.

What to Read For: Context, Genre, and Publication Status

Context Before You Read

Before reading, consider the assignment context and surrounding factors that influence how a text was produced and how you might read it.
Context questions suggested by students and scholars include:
- What is the author’s purpose for this piece?
- Who is the intended audience?
Example discussions around these questions use a hypothetical opening with a President Obama quote on the Iraq war to illustrate how context affects evaluation of a technique.
Contextual reasoning helps you evaluate whether a technique is appropriate or effective for a given audience and purpose.

Genre Matters

Genre refers to the type of writing (poem, article, essay, short story, legal brief, instruction manual, etc.). Conventions vary by genre, so techniques effective in one genre may fail in another.
Students note that genre shapes expectations (e.g., signaling words in philosophy, dialogue in fiction).
RLW applies equally to published texts and student-produced writing; you can analyze both to learn writing techniques.

Published vs Student-Produced Texts

When reading both kinds, you should consider how the author’s choices function differently in published vs student work.
Nancy Walker argues that reading published work with RLW makes it a living utterance with immediacy and texture; it could have been different with different choices.
RLW is useful for anticipating how you might write in a given assignment, including whether to adopt a particular style or technique.

Anticipating Your Own Writing Task

Knowing the kind of writing you will be asked to produce helps prioritize which writerly moves to study.
Jessie’s reflection emphasizes RLW as a tool to influence or inspire your own work by analyzing and modeling specific styles.
If a text models a particular emotional or humorous style, RLW helps you decide whether to borrow that style for your own aims and audience.

The Reading Questions: Before, During, and After Reading

Before Reading: Foundational Questions

Revisit essential questions:
- What is the author’s purpose for this piece?
- Who is the intended audience?
These questions guide what you should look for in the text and help you assess the effectiveness of the writer’s choices.

During Reading: Analytical Questions

A broad set of questions you can ask as you read, including but not limited to:
- How effective is the language the author uses (formality, tone)?
- What kinds of evidence does the author use (statistics, quotes, anecdotes, citations)? Is it appropriate?
- How does the author move from one idea to another? Are transitions effective? Could there have been better transitions?
- Are there places that are confusing? What about those places makes them unclear?
- How does the author’s language, evidence, and structure work to achieve the intended effect?
Distinctions by genre affect which questions are most relevant (e.g., opinion columns vs. short stories).

Before Reading: The Value of Context Revisited (Clare's Approach)

Clare’s approach: constantly question and imagine how you would proceed as the author; use those reflections to understand your own writing choices.

After Reading: Synthesis and Ethical Implications

Consider how readers might respond to the techniques you identified.
Evaluations should focus on effectiveness and appropriateness, not merely personal likes or dislikes.
The ultimate goal is to inform your own writing decisions by understanding how others’ choices affect readers.

Marking Up Text: Writing While Reading

What You Should Write While Reading

The most common student practice: mark up the text with margin notes and highlights.
Produce notes and summaries during and after reading; these notes often become material for your own papers.
Practical method used by Bunn:
- Highlight or underline passages with interesting writerly techniques.
- On a separate notepad, answer:
- What is the technique the author is using here?
- Is this technique effective?
- What would be the advantages and disadvantages if I tried this technique in my own writing?
The end result is a concrete list of techniques you can draw on when you begin writing.

RLW in Action: Analyzing the Opening Paragraph

Practice: Apply RLW to the essay’s opening paragraph

Opening paragraph content: describes Bunn’s London job at the Palace Theatre, Les Misérables, and the fire-safety context.
Apply the pre-reading questions and RLW approach to see how the author builds credibility, tone, and engagement.
Practice prompts include:
- Do you know the author’s purpose for this piece?
- Do you know who the intended audience is?
- What is the genre of this text?
- Is this text published or student-produced?
- Could you write something similar, and what would you change?
The paragraph’s detail (location, theater, ownership by Andrew Lloyd Webber) contributes to credibility and reader engagement; consider what would be lost if those details were omitted.

Analyzing Detail and Purpose

The details are not arbitrary: they establish setting, credibility, and a personal voice.
The choice of phrasing (e.g., "antiquated fire-safety laws") conveys a judgment about the laws and creates a critical tone.
The level of specificity helps readers connect with the author as a real person and sets up the central idea that reading like a writer reveals how texts are built.

The Value of Language Choices: Form, Tone, and Audience Effects

Formality vs. Conversational Style

The author prompts readers to consider when to use formal language and when a more conversational tone is appropriate.
Example thought exercise: replacing a formal phrase like "staff members" with "employees" or "workers" changes tone and perceived professionalism.
Audience and purpose should guide language choices; formal language may suit some contexts, while conversational language may be better for others.

The Role of Specificity and Detail

Detailed context (where the theatre is, the time frame after college) contributes to credibility and helps anchor the reader’s imagination.
The author asks readers to consider what would be lost by simplifying the details and what this reveals about audience connection and credibility.

Theoretical and Practical Contexts Referenced

Allen Tate (1940): Reading as architect—two ways of reading: historian vs. architect.
David Jauss (quote): Reading like a writer—examine details to see how it was made; reading as a carpenter examining a house.
Wendy Bishop: Turn from reacting to reading toward uncovering how the writer led you to feel and think; the idea of making sentence-level desire a focus for analysis.
Charles Moran: Reading like writers aligns with being an author and knowing the territory of writing; recognizing the moves writers make and their consequences.
Nancy Walker: Reading published work with RLW helps the text become a living artifact and invites consideration of how different choices might have produced different outcomes.

Connections to Practice and Teaching

RLW challenges the tendency of instructors to focus on writing itself without explicitly teaching how to read like a writer.
It positions reading as an active, intentional, and teachable skill that can improve writing quality and student confidence.
RLW encourages metacognition: thinking about how readers respond to language choices, not just content delivery.
The method supports transferable writing skills by focusing on structure, diction, evidence, and transitions that affect readers across genres.

Practical Implications and Ethical Considerations

RLW emphasizes responsibility: what you write and how you present it affects readers’ perceptions, emotions, and actions.
It fosters critical reading that can resist manipulation by recognizing how technique steers interpretation.
It supports inclusive and audience-aware writing by prompting questions about how different reader groups might respond to techniques.
By treating texts as open to improvement, RLW encourages constructive critique while avoiding demeaning judgments about authors.

How to Practice RLW: Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Before reading, note the author’s likely purpose and intended audience; assess the context and genre.
Step 2: Read with a pen/marker; highlight key writerly moves (word choice, tone, sentence length, transitions, evidence, structure).
Step 3: In margin notes, answer:
- What is the technique here?
- Is it effective for the intended purpose/audience?
- What are the potential advantages or disadvantages if you tried this technique?
Step 4: Reflect on how these moves could inform your own writing; anticipate how a reader might respond.
Step 5: Revisit the text to test alternative choices the author could have made and consider their potential impact.
Step 6: Compile a personal catalog of techniques and ideas you could apply in your own assignments.

Discussion and Reflection Prompts

How is Reading Like a Writer similar to or different from how you read in other courses?
What writing choices do you make that readers could identify in your own work?
Is there a technique or strategy from RLW you’d like to try? When and how will you apply it?
What are different ways to learn about a text’s context before reading it (author, audience, purpose, genre, publication status, etc.)?

Works Cited (Key References Mentioned in the Text)

Bishop, Wendy. "Reading, Stealing, and Writing Like a Writer." Elements of Alternate Style: Essays on Writing and Revision.
Jauss, David. "Articles of Faith." Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy.
Moran, Charles. "Reading Like a Writer." Vital Signs 1.
Straub, Richard. "Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’ Writing." The Subject is Reading.
Tate, Allen. "We Read as Writers." Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Walker, Nancy. "The Student Reader as Writer." ADE Bulletin.

Final Takeaway

RLW is a practical, disciplined way to read that treats reading as a central, teachable component of writing education.
It foregrounds how writers construct meaning and influence readers, and it provides a concrete toolkit for developing your own writing by studying others' craft.
By continually asking purposeful questions, marking up texts, and imagining alternative constructions, you build a repertoire of techniques you can adapt across genres and assignments.

Are you ready to start applying RLW to your next reading assignment? It’s a habit that grows with practice and reflection.