Some unique takeaways of reading How to Read Like a Writer is an aspect of not understanding why the author wrote each word in each sentence but the reasoning behind choosing those specific words to give significant meaning and understanding. This has opened my eyes to reevaluate choosing information for a writing assignment. The word choice the author chooses affects how the text’s message is conveyed to which reader group as well as the understanding of the knowledge level the readers should possess. Also, the strategies for rhetoric reading helped me take my audiences into consideration. Rosenberg taught me that the audience is very important, thinking about who my audiences are and what information they would want to know. Also in Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources, readers don’t have to read and understand all of the text but the majority of the text. Using text structures such as title, abstract and introduction can easily identify the audience and general summary of the text. Using these text structures can be useful to make simple work on figuring out text reliability in writing assignments as well as give an analysis that determines most of the details of the text. 

Rosenberg said reading academic texts is like entering a conversation. What this means is that you are inferring and understanding what you’re getting from the text and you’re able to speak back to it by building upon its text. To speak to the text one must give analytical questions of the text and understand the reasoning behind the questions. According to Bunn, some different ways that you can learn about the context of a text before you begin reading is to ask yourself two main questions: “Do you know the author’s purpose for this piece of writing? Do you know who the intended audience is for this piece of writing?” (Bunn 76). These questions should be asked before reading.

In these two readings, the authors help us understand the way the author thinks in their writing and shows us strategies to read these readings. They also help us interpret these strategies into our writings. In the reading, “How to Read Like a Writer ” by Mike Bunn, one tip we learn is to look at the writer’s techniques and question why the writer chose that specific route. Why did this author begin with a quote from this celebrity? Does it have significance later on in the reading? Analyzing questions we have help improve our way of thinking when it comes to our writings. Were influenced to change or improve the way we write and better understand the “behind the scenes” of each sentence/paragraph/essay. In the reading, “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” by Karen Rosenberg, a tip she states before reading any piece is that we should judge a book by its cover to some extent figuring out the primary audience the writing is for. By doing so we can figure out if the reading is or isn’t designated for us and understand why that is. As she states we should study the architecture of the article looking at key components, this is another tip she gives us. The key components are the title, the abstract (not all writings have one), the introduction, section headings, and the conclusion. These tips can help me improve my thought process on my writings in this course. Karen Rosenberg writes about reading academic texts as entering a conversation with the writer and for me, this means as we read we can create conversations thinking about the writer, making them the larger picture in trying to understand the reading. We can have a conversation within a text by questioning the steps the author takes in creating the reading piece helping us develop a relationship with the text and author. Mike Bunn shows us different ways we can learn about the context of a text before reading it. These are considering the contextual factors, determining the author’s purpose, and the intended audience the writing piece is for. Mike Bunns Voice in the reading felt more formal than Karen Rosenberg although reading Rosenberg’s text I felt like she was having a real conversation with me. I understood and related to some of the points she made at the beginning of her writing piece.