Another great creative workshop on writing skills with Peter Thomas

 If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word. (MARGARET ATWOOD)

 

 

Yesterday morning we had another very useful and helpful workshop on writing skills. We focused this time more on academic writings but also on reading too.  We went through an experiment how to actually read the academic text, article, what strategies to make while reading and how how engage with the text. I have learned that actually we can know more about the text and make a selection after reading first sentence. First sentence is a summary sentence. 

We need a good reading strategy otherwise we are lost in the battle with the time and amount of texts we need to digest. So one of the main question we brought to the workshops is what are we looking for? what is the topic? why is relevant? how is the text organized? like i said we need a good strategy, reading technique. Regarding that, Peter offered us a MIND MAPP in 5 steps: 1. survey;2. questions; 3.read; 4 recite; 5. one of his proposals review how we should read, active think, what important we should find from the text? how we should find text through skimming, scanning, going through details, critical thinking... Ultimately is good to read a text from the beginning to the end, BUT sometimes we need to ask ourselves how much we have time and how much do we need from the text? Do we really need to go through every book word by word? We ought to know how to manage our time, and this we can also apply in things we are doing in daily life. While studying we need to be pragmatic, strategic, reductive, initially just skin throughout the text. If is of our own interest than we should go through the text carefully, find relevant picture and go with that.

As a writer we need to have a pattern for the reader to explain. We need to be sure that reader gets information about what you want to tell them somewhere at the beginning. It must be a nice dialog between two of them. We need to produce coherent text which goes together. it must be relevant to our words, and we need to connect to each other, be explicit, like this is this and this is that! We must make clear some things in the text for the reader.