Reading, Reconsidered
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Stray Lines
August 24, 2020
Dear Reader, Do you ever find that a line from a work just won’t leave you? Sometimes it’s literally the line; often it’s most of the line with a swapped in...
The Intellectually Honest Read
August 13, 2020
Dear Reader, The intellectually honest read is a fairly simple one. Its most common form runs this way: if you really disagree with some writer’s stance, you...
Words from the Wise and Otherwise, Part Six
August 6, 2020
Dear Reader, I recently stumbled upon a conversation among academics about the anti-intellectual practices they make as a regular habit. It was not an...
Reading as a Teacher
August 2, 2020
Dear Reader, Today’s piece was inspired by my return visit to Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. My return was occasioned by a...
The Fallacy of Full Comprehension
July 22, 2020
“I know she’s reading a lot, but does she understand everything she’s reading?” This question and framing, or some variation of it, is a fairly frequent one...
Just Not For You
July 20, 2020
Dear Reader, Sometimes, a read is just not for you. This isn’t the same as an ambivalent read, where you sort of leave with a shoulder shrug. A read that...
Words from the Wise and Otherwise, Part Five
July 15, 2020
Dear Reader, Today’s collection of thoughts on reading will come from thinkers from the deeper and more recent past. I had to open with this quote, as not a...
Lost in Thought, Part 7
July 9, 2020
Dear Reader, Turning to the Epilogue, I should probably note its title: “The Everyday Intellectual.” That title is one I personally have no interest in. This...
The Ongoing Conversation
July 7, 2020
Dear Reader, We might call this “The Never-Ending Conversation,” but I thought that title would lead to no one reading this essay. In a sense, both that and...
Lost in Thought, Part 6
July 2, 2020
Dear Reader, Chapter 3 of Lost in Thought provides some great fodder for the reading life. A particularly delightful quote is the following: “An excellent...
Ramping Up
June 30, 2020
Dear Reader, While I’ve written quite a bit about background knowledge’s role in reading comprehension, those pieces were about the general stretching of...
Lost in Thought, Part 5
June 25, 2020
Dear Reader, I must admit that Chapter 2 of Lost in Thought doesn’t have as much material for reading specifically. It has a metric ton for the intellectual...
Congruous Incongruities
June 24, 2020
Dear Reader, I am paraphrasing here, but philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has noted that most dilemmas emerge because of some error in the past. Well, I’m...
Lost in Thought, Part 4
June 18, 2020
Dear Reader, Chapter 1 of Lost in Thought has a most excellent paragraph reflecting on reading. It’s about the reading of one book, but the description has...
Words from the Wise and Otherwise, Part Four
June 16, 2020
Dear Reader, Today’s contribution to this series will be a single author and a single quote. That author is widely respected as wise. And the work from which...
Lost in Thought, Part 3
June 11, 2020
Dear Reader, The Introduction to Lost in Thought possesses a number of engaging threads. I want to select two moments from it, from the same section, as they...
Reading As a Writer – Part Two
June 9, 2020
Dear Reader, I recently participated in a seminar with editor Steve Padilla, and while I shouldn’t have been surprised by the session’s ending point, I was....
Lost in Thought, Part 2
June 6, 2020
Dear Reader, One of the things I’d originally meant to comment on in my first essay on Lost in Thought is something strange that I did at the outset. Before...
Chocolate Taste Tests
June 4, 2020
Dear Reader, I’d hoped to avoid an excess of personal stories, as I prefer the substance of these pieces to be outside my idiosyncrasies, but then I receive...
Lost in Thought, Part 1
May 31, 2020
Dear Reader, I’ll be going through Lost in Thought these next several weeks as my second post for each week. This is for a few reasons. One of them is that...
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