APPRECIATION: ANNOTATING ARTICLES

I love writing on writing. I mean this in most ways this can mean, though not particularly in the grading papers vein. I love underlining things or circling or starring or creating little boxes around particular paragraphs. It’s a way of collecting sentences, of owning certain insights.

There are many variations of the “You are what you _________.” Eat, read, etc. I saw somewhere the phrase that “You are what you underline.” I like that. I like writing on papers. Commenting and circling, and all of it. I just read an amazing article in the March 2 New York Times Magazine by Sam Anderson about Annie Dillard. Here it is.

Check out this sentence:

Over more than 40 years, she has been, sometimes all at once, a poet, essayist, novelist, humorist, naturalist, critic, theologian, collagist and full-throated singer of mystic incantations.    – Sam Anderson on Annie Dillard

How great is that? As a description of someone, as a sentence, as a career path. I love it.

And this one:

From the start, this has been Dillard’s mission: to crowbar surprise, sentence by sentence, into all the gaps of our ordinary experience.    – Sam Anderson on Annie Dillard

I want that to be my mission too.

And this:

What we need from great writing, most urgently, is an understanding that the mundane itself – snails, fireplaces, shrubs, pebbles, socks, minor witticisms – is secretly amazing.    – Sam Anderson on Annie Dillard

I agree. I love it. I appreciate writing on writing. I love collecting sentences and interacting with the text. I love Annie Dillard, and apparently what Sam Anderson writes about her in the New York Times Magazine. Look at those sentences again. Great stuff. Makes me want to take out a pen and pay my respects.