English 1006
Prompt #39
26 November 2013
How we read, really
Looking for patterns, looking for insights
The responses to the sequenced reading of "The Second Death" have
a lot to tell us about how we read, how others read, how we might
like to read, and how authors expect us to read. They can only
tell us that if we listen carefully, though. I'm going to ask you
to spend some time with these comments.
As I said this afternoon, I had hoped to spend some time looking
at the responses to the first section -- the bare title of the
story -- to see if we could pick out some patterns of response --
some things people brought to the reading, and some things the
writer apparently expected us to bring to it. Since we didn't get
to do that, I've decided to divide our attention to the responses
to the story into two parts.
The first will happen between now and Thursday. Here's what you
should do, before 1:00 Thursday.
There are three Web pages set up, each of which has one of the
first three sections of the story and all the responses to them
that I had received by Sunday night. What you should do is visit
each in turn, read through the section of the story and the
responses, and click the link at the bottom, which will take you
to a forum thread on that section of the story. What you should do
there is post a five-minute inkshed about what you saw. You may
want to consider any of the following:
- Was there something
(or perhaps more than one thing) that someone said that you
hadn't thought of, and which would possibly affect or change
your reading?
- Was there a post
(or were there posts) which allowed you to see that the person
writing had brought with her an idea, a value, an opinion, an
expectation, which you didn't bring?
- Did someone make a
prediction about what was to come that surprised you, or that
seemed particularly worth thinking about?
- Did anything else
strike you about the set of responses to this part of the
story?
Do this for each of the
first three sections of the story in turn. The three sections are
here:
They're also linked
from the main course page.
Conditions for participating
A number of people read the story and posted responses too late
to be included as I set this up this afternoon (the
deadline, you may remember, was Sunday night; I began extracting
and reformatting responses Monday morning). If you did that, you
can participate in this part of the exercise; if, however, you
have not completed the sequenced reading, you can't do this
until you have done so. Read the story, respond to the sections,
and then come back to this exercise.
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1006G