Read Critically - But How

Here's a formula, which need not be fixed in one's mind. Develop your own strategies in reading and writing. However, its imperative to learn from other's experience for you cannot become him/her (I can do leactureship me! Wrong). But what a way of reading this (following) essayist had! And the implications of practising it which follow 'like a liquid mercury on a sloping thing', to be archaic or not, shall be fertile, hopefully.

I went back to the good nature books that I had read. And I analyzed them. I wrote outlines of whole books - outlines of chapters - so that I could see their structure. And I copied down their transitional sentences or their main sentences or their closing sentences. I especially paid attention to how these writers made transitions between paragraphs and scenes.

-ANNIE DILLARD

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