When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing.

Over the semester, everyone will write one summary that documents our class conversation for a particular week. These conversation summaries should bring together both synchronous and asynchronous work. They may include reference to assigned readings, in-class conversations, discussion board posts, group updates, hypothesis annotations, or other elements of the work we do that week. You must acknowledge, in your writing, the sources that you use, whether those sources are an assigned reading, or the contributions of one of your peers. You should include at least one direct quote, and one paraphrase.

I spent five years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—a place I didn’t even know existed until I moved there to attend graduate school. I lived in a town of four thousand people. The next town over, over the portage bridge, had seven thousand people. In my town, the street signs were in both English and Finnish because the town had the highest concentration of Finns outside of Finland. We were so far north that my blackness was more curiosity than threat. I was a woman out of place but I did not always feel unsafe. There were the abandoned copper mines and the vast majesty of Lake Superior and so much forest cloaking everything. During fall, deer hunting, so much venison. The winters were endless, snow in unfathomable quantities, the aching whine of snowmobiles. There was loneliness. There were my friends, who made the isolation bearable. There was a man who made everything beautiful. What I cannot forget is my landlady, who rented my apartment to me over the phone and who, when she first met me, told me I didn’t sound like a colored girl.

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing.

Then I wrote some terrible, terrible stories.

You might share the story of a particular resonant experience

We would have classes, workshops, or lessons, but there would be no official grading of omelets or yoga poses, since letters and numbers would be meaningless in those scenarios.

he had lost time due to the discussion with his wife — he ascended clad for venturing out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece, to the covered roof pasture whereon his electric sheep "grazed."

Breathing, always a pleasant activity in ordinary times, has now become the most thrilling activity on Earth.