Sosnoski Response

The Sonoski reading for our very first blog post was a challenge. I honestly did not get very much from it because I did not understand it. Web scripting, hyper-reading, and stuff like that is a mystery to me, and because I did not truly understand the basic overview, I had trouble trying to distinguish the deeper meanings, though I will attempt to explain what I saw. The “design” concept threw me for a loop.

First of all, the overall structure of this essay was well done. The author formatted his ideas with a use of support from several colleges and went in depth with details on each subject. He stayed to a set structure, going from one topic to another in an understandable series. The introduction to the essay set the stage for what was going to be discussed, and in that thesis the author did not deviate too much. I do believe the essay was a little wordy, as in the author was not precise with words. He elaborated and went off into separate anecdotes often, which made my mind wander and made his main point harder to understand. Though he often warned the reader before going into the anecdotes, they were still hard to understand and it took awhile to get back into the flow of writing. But as is usually the case with distinguished authors, wordiness is accepted. In my opinion, it made it a lot harder to understand.

I did like the part of the essay where the author went into detail about the problems of hyper-reading like filtering, skimming, imposing, filming, fragmenting, and others. I see this problem in many areas as a college student. Many students “skim” textbooks and take the easy way out of reading by watching a movie or reading cliff notes. Like the author of this text, I find this completely criminal. I love reading and cannot stand to just skim over a text, even if it is a boring textbook. And, personally, a movie can NEVER do justice to reading a book. All of the topics the author covered have relevance to both reading online and reading in the hardcopy book form. In my opinion, books will never go out of date, even if many chose to read online in today’s world.

Although this article was very hard to understand, I did come away with some good advice about structuring an essay, how to organize in a set list of ideas and explain them with examples, and I learned how to introduce separate anecdotes. I hope at a later date I will be able to better distinguish messages within text and learn how to structure my essays to the best of my ability.