I haven’t made any secret of the fact that, for some years now, I’ve done a fair bit of freelance work developing instructional materials, contracting for a company that offers a subscription service to month-long lesson plans and their associated activity and essay prompts, short-answer questions, and multiple-choice items. (Before that, I spent a lot of time and earned less money writing summaries and study guides. Both have their attractions and their drawbacks.) What I haven’t necessarily shared is a lot about how I generally go about doing that work–and for what I think is good reason; while my work is my work and takes me to do it, I don’t know that waxing loquacious about my methods is helpful for me staying in business. But a recent project has suggested to me that there are a few things I can share, such as are likely to be of help not so much to my competitors (because there are other people who do this kind of work, even if I think I do it better than they do), but to those who will still read and study, whether for the pleasure of it or because they justly oppose the outsourcing of their thinking work to the plagiaristic algorithms of putative machine intelligences.

Normally, when I do the work of drafting a month-long lesson plan (and its associated activities, essay prompts, short-answer questions, and multiple choice items), I start by reading, and I most commonly read for this purpose in electronic copy. I do so almost entirely due to concerns of portability; I’m able to take more materials to more places and engage with greater ease, even if it is still the case that I do not read as well from a screen as I do from a physical page. (Your results may vary; I’m discussing my practice and nobody else’s.) And when I read for such purposes, I do slide it in alongside other activities; I’ve reviewed a lot of text while walking on a treadmill at one gym or another, and a lot more while seated at odd intervals as nature bids me do. (Truly, some of what I’ve been paid to read and write about has deserved no better setting than surrounded by foul odors of one sort or another.) I do what I can to take advantage of the features of my e-readers (and, yes, it’s plural for a reason; I prefer to use one program, but I am often constrained or encouraged to use another, entirely, client demands and publishing disparities being what they are), marking up the text to the extent allowed, but even after years of doing such work in such ways, I find the electronic apparatus…unwieldy.

Recently, though, I took on a project that prompted me to pull down a physical copy of the subject text. (It was cheaper to get it in hardback than to get it electronically, if such a thing can be believed, and I had it in hand the next day.) Consequently, I did not read it in quite so many places as I am accustomed to reading my freelance-work texts, but did so with a pencil in hand, as if it were once again a text I was studying for my English classes a decade and more ago. Doing so, I found it easier to connect with the work as I was doing with the book as I was reading it; I had to repeat things fewer times (although distractions did ensure that there was still some repetition), and I was able to see things in the text and connections within it that I do not think would have occurred to me had I been dealing with an electronic version of the text. There is something faster about thumbing through pages, at least for me, than swiping left and right on the screen, and the added tactility of an actual page, the increased sensory presentation of it, do something to ease my reading admirably.

Perhaps it is merely an issue of my Millennial rearing reasserting itself. I am, after all, old enough that I was taught to read from books rather than tablets and telephones, and even as a graduate student in the 2010s, I worked with materials that had not yet been made available digitally in a way I could access them. (How much of that has changed, I am not sure at the moment. I could look, but that would mean I am not doing this, and this is what I want to do at the moment.) Perhaps it is the training I received in graduate school and which I practiced at some length in the years afterwards telling on me, even now. The habits developed over several decades would be expected to carry more cognitive force than those inculcated over one and a bit more, after all. So I am not suggesting that reading a physical text is some sort of intellectual panacea, nor yet am I decrying the use of electronic texts. (Again, I do make common and consistent use of them.) I am, however, saying that, for my reading for this purpose, it has been good to get back to the physical page for a bit, and, if it is the case that the opportunity to do so presents itself again, I think I might well take it.

Remember, I’m happy to write for you, whether it’s instructional and assessment material, poetry, ad copy, or something else entirely! Get your project started today by filling out the form below!

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