The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck

Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.

Writing Is Thinking

When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you. Done well, this kind of sharing means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise. But writers are made, n…

This is Not the End of Reading. It's the End of Modernism.

Why academics and journalists are confusing Modernism with reading itself.

On Writing #3

Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.

The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer - T.R Napper

I’m obsessed with the craft of writing. I write every day, I read about the craft often, and in my...

Robert Hanks · On Putting Things Off

Job gone, I sat around trying to write, managing bits and pieces, but earning very little. And then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High Wind in Jamaica. I like Hughes and it seemed like a job I could get on with. I cheerfully settled to the research, reading the novels I hadn’t read, rereading the ones I had. Then I started writing, or that’s what I told myself: some paragraphs, some sentences, a sketch of a plan, then some rewriting, rearranging, scrubbing, more rewriting, more scrubbing, pauses to reconsider. Then I did some more research: the short stories, the children’s stories, the poems and plays, the journalism, Richard Perceval Graves’s biography, then back to the rewriting …

BookHive — Reading is better together

Track your books, connect with friends, and discover your next favourite read on an open, social platform.

BookHive — Reading is better together

Track your books, connect with friends, and discover your next favourite read on an open, social platform.

BookHive — Reading is better together

Track your books, connect with friends, and discover your next favourite read on an open, social platform.

afterword

Writing this handbook has been a process of not over-thinking it. In deciding to do it post-by-post, day-by-day, I practiced sharing as I went, posting to a ...

Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation

Reading augmentation systems increasingly help readers process text at scale. While these tools address real constraints of time and cognitive load, they often implicitly frame reading as information transmission, or "reading to discard," delegating interpretation and effort to the machine. Yet this delegation changes the outcome of reading. For example, in scholarly reading, deciding what a research text implies and why it matters is central to the work of scholarly production. We propose creative reading as an alternative goal: reading augmentation that supports readers in creating both readings and themselves as readers. By putting literary and narrative theories into conversation with scholarly sensemaking and creativity support, we present a provocation-oriented design space for valuing the process of reading as a way of preserving a plurality of readings and transforming readers over time.

Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation

Reading augmentation systems increasingly help readers process text at scale. While these tools address real constraints of time and cognitive load, they often implicitly frame reading as information transmission, or "reading to discard," delegating interpretation and effort to the machine. Yet this delegation changes the outcome of reading. For example, in scholarly reading, deciding what a research text implies and why it matters is central to the work of scholarly production. We propose creative reading as an alternative goal: reading augmentation that supports readers in creating both readings and themselves as readers. By putting literary and narrative theories into conversation with scholarly sensemaking and creativity support, we present a provocation-oriented design space for valuing the process of reading as a way of preserving a plurality of readings and transforming readers over time.

Working Through the Fear of Being Seen

A personal essay about returning to writing, navigating visibility, and rebuilding confidence after years of second-guessing.

Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation

Reading augmentation systems increasingly help readers process text at scale. While these tools address real constraints of time and cognitive load, they often implicitly frame reading as...

A home for the writing you love · Standard Reader

New writing from the standard.site publications you subscribe to — calm, chronological, and yours to take anywhere.