Come attirare dentro il testo

Ho scelto l’incipit di questo libro perché Roy Peter Clark è un maestro straordinario e ha ispirato questi Testi Maestri. Non c’è quindi miglior testo per cominciare a “copiare” con creatività e consapevolezza. Ho deciso di lasciarlo in inglese: è semplice, scorrevole, immediato.

Where do writers learn their best moves? They learn them from a technique I call X-ray reading. They read for information or vicarious experience or pleasure, as we all do. But in the reading, they see something more. It’s as if they had a third eye or a pair of X-ray glasses like the ones advertised years ago in comic books.

This special vision allows them to see beneath the surface of the text. There they observe the machinery of making meaning, invisible to the rest of us. Through a form of reverse engineering, a good phrase used by scholar Steven Pinker, they see the moving parts, the strategies that create the effects we experience from the page ─ effects such as clarity, suspense, humour, epiphany, and pain. These working parts are then stored in the writer’s toolshed in boxes with names such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, semantics, etymology, poetics, and that big box ─ rhetoric. Let’s go to work.