Last week I received a copy of a book by Ben Yagoda (2004):

The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk about Style and Voice in Writing. Harper: New York, London, Toronto and Sydney.

Ben Yagoda was (and perhaps still is) a teacher of non-fiction writing at the University of Delaware, USA.

I like this book. I like this author. He is writing about something that is difficult to define, that others have avoided writing about for reasons that he explains well.

He puts our efforts as writers in historical perspective.

I'd like to re-read my own papers after finishing this book, to understand my own writing better.

Here's a key statement, from page thirty-six:

"After all my years of teaching and being taught, I am convinced that there is only one specific, consistently reliable tip writers in training can be given: read your stuff aloud, if not literally, then with an inner voice attended to by the inner ear."

The need to read and hear our own writing is something I try to tell my own students.

When I first started building the Research Cooperative website, I wrote a poem to the same effect. The title is:

Read it.

Please do.

It's just a poem. It won't bite.