Reading and Awareness

Part II, Re Last Sunday's Exercise

I thought we might spend one more session on our exercise of last Sunday.

The goal of that exercise was to improve our ability to discern (and trust) our micro-reactions to a given text (including our own). 

The more choices the writer makes during revision, the more she gets of herself into the text (that’s my theory, anyway).  The resulting quality of presence is what appeals to a reader and is, in fact, why we read: to feel another soul proximate to ours, and sense that that soul is not so very different from ours.