Reprinted with permission of Writer’s Digest Books from Writing Personal Essays: How to Shape Your Life Experiences for the Page by Sheila Bender, Writer’s Digest Books, 1995

About The Three-Step Response

To help the writer understand what kind of contact his or her writing makes, my responsibility as a reader of the work is to:

1. report the images and phrases that stick with me
2. monitor the feelings that occur inside me as I read, and report these feelings accurately, and
3. tell the writer where I want to know more.

If you are going to be your own reader, make sure you have managed to take time away from your draft so it will seem like a fresh piece of writing to you and you can be more impartial as you look at it using this response system. If you are going to ask others to respond to your draft, make sure they understand that you want them to give you response in the three separate ways I describe below.

Step One: Velcro Words
After I read a draft, I say out loud the phrases and images that stick with me. This method, called “say back” by writing teacher Natalie Goldberg, identifies the details that have jumped off the page and into the reader’s mind. One of my students told me she thought of these details as velcro words.
A note here: Just repeat the words and phrases that stick. Do not tell why they stick. It is important for writers to hear their words back just as they said them. To explain why they stick in your mind takes the focus away from the writing.

Step Two: Feelings
Now, as a reader, you’re ready to report the feelings you experience from the writing. First report feelings you get that seem to be in keeping with the subject and subtext. If someone is writing about being stuck with two two-year-olds in a line of cars at U.S. — Canadian customs and he says he feels like Mt. St. Helens right before she erupted, what do you feel? Bottled anger or almost unbearable frustration may be the feelings you report.

Next, report whatever discomfort occurs from phrasing and details that veer from the writing’s subject and subtext. For instance, if the writer above included a detail like, “I was so angry my stomach felt like a pond under a clear blue sky,” you might report that the clear blue sky evoked calmness that was annoying in the context of all this frustration.

Peer responses can help you, the writer, identify tailspins and meanderings from your real subjects. If your readers are confused, if they feel ripped off, if they feel batted around in different directions, your words are causing that confusion, that theft, that assault. If such emotional journeys are not in the service of your real subject, you have to change your words.

Step Three: Curiosity
Now it’s time to tell the writer where you, the reader, want to know more. Be as specific as possible. Your comments will indicate to the writer where more writing is required.

When as the writer, you listen to where others want to know more, you recognize your real subject and where and how you have skirted around it. You often realize that what you skipped because you thought it might bore a reader is exactly what the reader wants to know!