Read to Write [antikvár]

-— == To Student and Teacher In my other books 1 have written separate introductions to student and teacher, but that is not appropriate here. In writing and reading, student and teacher are the same, or should be. I have learned as much from my students as I have taught them; often I feel I have learned more than I have taught. We both learn from the text: our own evolving drafts and the texts of published writers. I am in my sixties but I have not yet learned to read and write; my daily delight is that I continue to learn to read and write. And the skills of reading and writing are intertwined. School often tries to separate them, but it cannot. In writing our own drafts we read and, when the writing goes well, we read with surprise, discovering that our words mean more than we expected, or, at least, something different than we expected. Our drafts teach us what to say and how to say it. We write and learn. Just as we see our texts for the first time as we write them, so we should come to the texts of other writers—prepared to be surprised, ready to travel to new places, to look at familiar places differently, to experience other worlds and other ideas, to become the people on the page, to question, to doubt, to think, to feel, to care, to learn. We read as we write, with difference. Each of us brings our own knowledge, our own backgrounds, our own needs to the pages we write and read. We are individual writers and readers of individual texts. As we each learn, in our own way, to read and write, what we learn helps us see the possibilities of reading and writing. We discover what can be done on the page by reading and can try it when we write. And by trying it we better understand, when we return to reading, how writing is made. This text is designed to take advantage of individuahty and diversity; it celebrates diversity and encourages you, student or teacher, to read and write in your own way. vii