Reading Like a Writer: A Creative Writer’s Approach to New Formalism

Abstract

Dear Reader, This is not a letter. ‘Dear Reader’ is not a salutation but a rhetorical strategy for introducing the currency of form. Whenever we put fingers to a keyboard or pencil to paper we, consciously or not, consider form. Form directs the tone, style, and organization of even the first words: Hey, friend! Or, Let me begin by defining. Or, When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes. Or, Dear Mrs Schuster. A personal email begins differently than an academic essay or a sonnet or a note to your child’s teacher. When our students submit essays of literary analysis, we expect them to follow the appropriate form (as well as formatting), and we are jarred by their reference to Shakespeare as, simply, William or by the informal use of an ampersand. I include a line on my syllabi requesting that, in their emails to me, students observe the formal difference between an email to a professor and a text message to a friend (I am not a ‘u’). Amid the proliferation of new technologies and forms of discourse, adherence to even such arbitrary constructions of form matters, and, as I hope to have suggested by my opening move, breaking with form – beginning an academic essay in the form of a letter – matters just as much. Our ability to adapt, appropriate, and alter forms of discourse is key to our progress as creators of art and knowledge.