"How Do I Read?"

        341 offers you a chance to explore your reading habits at fundamental levels, questioning the decisions you make when choosing texts and operating them.  Successful readers (and writers!) must master countless codes, conventions and stylistic choices in order to operate the world of text.  Stranger still, successful operation of written language requires its users largely to forget that they ever learned the most basic elements of the language so that thinking about them will not interfere with higher order thinking.
        To establish a starting point for this exploration, and to help you get to know other members of the class as readers and writers, please come to the first class prepared to discuss what you can remember of how you learned to read, how you read now, and how you  might (or might not!) read in the future.    You can address this question in many ways, and all will tell us something about your preferences and habits and training as a reader.  Taking some notes might be a good idea, and while you're at it, you can think about how you learned to write!

        If you wish, you also can share observations and questions on the online "Canvas" "General Discussion Forum" for 341.

        Some suggestions (not requirements!) that might get you started.  Some of these topics also relate to questions you will encounter on the SurveyMonkey site but this gives you more opportunity to reflect on the questions and your answers:

• Your Reading History: Do you remember any qualitative details about learning to read, or early reading experiences that shaped your adult encounters with texts?  How was it connected to learning to write?  Do you remember learning the alphabet of your first language in any form?  Do you associate reading with persons, events, social status, or politics in ways that might differ from other readers? 
  
• Your Current Reading Preferences/Habits: Do you read online texts like this one differently from the way you read print texts?  Have those reading habits changed during your lifetime?  Are there any kinds of writing that you will not or even cannot read online, even if a digital copy is available?  Do you read printed books differently from the way you read handwritten manuscript texts?  Would you prefer to read everything online if it were available in that medium?
  
• Your Current Writing Preferences/Habits: If you had to estimate in crude percentages, how much of your writing is digital-only, how much is destined for print, and how much is manuscript-only (including your own writing).  Have your writing habits changed significantly since you first learned how to do it, and can you associate changes with any events, devices, or writing tasks?  If you  ran the world and could dictate what kind of writing you  would do without negotiating with readers, which medium would you choose: digital, print, or manuscript?
  
• Your Predictions: What do you think will be the future of reading?  Once, written language did not exist.  Even after writing was invented, for many thousands of years it was used mainly as an accounting tool and to issue laws or commands.  Can you imagine circumstances in which reading as you now know it would disappear or become such a rare skill as to be irrelevant in human culture, or perhaps practiced only by an elite (or servile!) cadre of specialists?  If reading went away, what might replace reading?

     Please do not be concerned that you will "do it wrong."  You cannot do it wrong.  The only error would be not to attempt it.