@matt:

The text sits between two ways of seeing the world

Transition story:

“When readers say ‘I’m confused,’ students often hear ‘my English is bad.’ Sometimes that is true. But often the deeper problem is navigation.”

Key point:

• Many writers use writing as a thinking process: writing helps them think their way toward an understanding of the world, and the text feeds back into their thinking.
• Readers are also trying to understand the world, but they must do it through the text.
• So the text sits in the middle. It can either preserve the writer’s private thinking path, or it can give readers a usable path from text to world.
• A draft that helped you think may not yet help readers read.

Connect to Larry McEnerney:

“McEnerney’s warning is not simply ‘write more clearly.’ It is that the process that helped you understand something may not be the process that helps readers understand it.”