you’ll have to train yourself to do it well.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of starting with a quote? What about the advantages and disadvantages of starting with a quote from the President? How would other readers respond to this technique? Would certain readers (say Democrats or liberals) appreciate an essay that started with a quote from President Obama better than other readers (say Republicans or conservatives)? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of starting with a quote from a less divisive person? What about starting with a quote from someone more divisive?

These are all reasonable questions to ask.

The goal is to carefully consider the choices the author made and the techniques that he or she used, and then decide whether you want to make those same choices or use those same techniques in your own writing. Author and professor Wendy Bishop explains how her reading process changed when she began to read like a writer:

Say you’re reading an essay in class that begins with a short quote

The goal as you read like a writer is to locate what you believe are the most important writerly choices

trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together

Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the 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

I realized writing is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process.

For most college students RLW is a new way to read, and it can be difficult to learn at first. Making things even more difficult is that your college writing instructor may expect you to read this way for class but never actually teach you how to do it.

How to Read Like a Writer

When you read like a writer, you are trying to figure out how the text you are reading was constructed so that you learn how to “build” one for yourself.