greywash:

So a reader left a comment on byw 56 (really, more than one reader, and more than one comment) which I am addressing on Tumblr instead of on the AO3, because, basically, I did not have room to write a five thousand word essay back to them in my comments. I also apologize for my somewhat stilted use of no contractions before the cut; I am trying to get around a Tumblr bug that turns apostrophes and quotation marks and emdashes into display garbage on the dash.

First, let me back up for a second, because, to me, the most important part of my reply is my reasoning for why I am not, in fact, going to reply very directly to the actual specific questions that these specific readers asked. WELP SORRY! I apologize for this if it is frustrating; but, as those of you that have been around here for a while know, while I was in grad school (and before that when I was kind of perpetually underemployed) my primary source of income was tutoring K-12 students. Unsurprisingly, since I was headed for a STEM graduate degree, I taught a lot of math, but my primary tutoring area of focus was actually critical reading for students who were preparing for the SAT (note for non-U.S. readers: the SAT is the main ~college preparatory readiness~ exam in the U.S., your score on which heavily influences university admissions). And a big part of why I often do not like to answer questions about my writing, including some of the questions that these particular readers raised in these particular comments, is because for most of my adult life, I have fed and clothed and housed myself by failing to answer questions about writing by other people. When you are teaching someone to read critically, particularly when you are teaching young people to read critically, the most effective thing you can do is, very frequently, to not answer their questions, but to do so in a considered and deliberate way.

(Note: If talking about the idea of critical reading in a fannish context is going to peel your onions, you should maybe stop reading this essay right now.)

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