How I Read

I'm losing track of what day it is -- I'm seriously not used to conventions that start on Sunday and end on Wednesday -- and nothing terribly exciting happened today. (As I might have mentioned before, I'm down in Charleston, SC for the Blackbaud International Conference on Philanthropy, and my duties mostly consist of a stretch of hours of booth duty each day.) So I'm digging into the archives for this bit, which was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 1/10/04, in reply to a general question:

I read word-for-word (unless I'm getting tired or bored, in which cases I sometimes find I'm -- accidentally or on purpose -- skipping lines or just looking at words but not reading them).

I think I'm unlike most readers in that I hardly ever get images in my head of anything I'm reading -- descriptions of things or people are words to me, not pieces of a picture. And so descriptions of complicated actions (particularly in action scenes) can bore me to tears -- "the ASR ascended, turning to starboard, and then looped around the massed Twak'tars with a sketchy Immelman, its thrusters shuddering as it dodged trees and flying Zarniwhoops" is just "blah blah blah something is moving blah blah blah" to me.