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Megan Woodie

Professor Jan Rieman

October 3, 2010

Observation

So what can I get for you today? Is the first thing that you are normally asked when

walking into a coffee shop. Well that where my story begins. I never realized how many people

spend time in coffee shops reading and writing, but there are definitely bunches that do. There

are a few things that I noticed while sitting in that coffee shop; the different ways people write,

the things that people read, and how people interact with one another while writing.

To start off it may seem strange that I was able to notice the different things that people

write in just the short amount of time that I was in the coffee shop, but I was. The first thing that

I noticed someone writing was a poem. Poetry in itself is just interesting to me because I am not

able to understand it. Most of the other things that people were writing were on their computers,

so I was not able to pick up on what it was. But there was one woman that was working on a

novel. The reason I know is because she was so interesting to me that I went up to her and asked

her what she was working on and she said her second novel. She was by far the most interesting

person there that day just because of the way she was writing. So I found it very interesting to

just be able to sit and watch the people around me write.

I also found it extremely interesting to see the different things that people were reading.

There was one man that was reading a book that had too of been around a thousand pages long,

and it seemed like he was reading through it so fast. But other than him there were mostly
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people reading the newspaper, with the exception of the ones reading novels. The main reason I

think the majority of people were reading the newspaper was because it was extremely early in

the morning. But I still found it fascinating to watch the way that each of the people were

reading their texts.

Watching people communicate with each other while they were writing was by far the

most interesting thing that I noticed at the coffee shop. There were people doing things as simple

as just throwing up a hand to say hello but then there were some that would completely stop what

they were doing to answer someone. I found that most of the people who were writing poetry

would stop everything to talk, while the ones that were writing on their computers barely even

took time to throw up their hands with a wave. But I believe the not throwing up a hand just

goes to show how serious they were about their writing.

When I walked into the coffee shop that day I had no idea what to expect, but I came out

with a lot of knowledge about the way that people react to the different things they are engaged

in. I learned about things such as what people write and how they write it all the way to how

people react to talking with others while writing. I also learned that people read a lot of the same

things at the same time of the day. But overall I believe that I learned that not everyone is going

to read and write in the same forms.