It’s odd sometimes what you wake up thinking about. Take this morning for example. My head is all a whirl with Plato’s Phaedrus and Derrida’s deconstruction of Phaedrus to show that Plato the old sock, argued against himself when he insisted that writing is secondary and lesser to speech. Please don’t expect quotes at this time, or any further exploratory blurb about Derrida. It is not quite 9am and I haven’t even sipped my coffee yet and to be honest, at this stage, I would only be regurgitating facts rather than imparting real knowledge.

The whole speech/writing thing came up in my Theory and Innovation assignment because I was applying Bahktin’s Dialogic to the Stephen King short story ‘Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut’, which is a story told by one man to another who in turn tells it to the reader. The majority of the story is dialogue. On Thursday during our poetic meter workshop (we had to depoetise the writer’s room before David Bishop would come back in and he still spat in each corner) we were looking at rhythm in prose and one of my colleagues asked if we should read our own work out loud as part of our writing process. I realised in that instant that 98% of the time I do read anything I have written out loud to sense check and assess.

I appreciate this is of no interest to anyone but myself but it is what is occupying my mind this morning. I may investigate this for the subject of my next assignment. Oh. Which reminds me. I have an assignment to complete by Thursday. Maybe I should start thinking about that instead.