# Read for Cause

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 7 · Part 1: Practice and attention

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> Read widely for range and closely for cause.

*Bleak House* opens with a word and a period. “London.” Charles Dickens follows it with a sentence about Michaelmas term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, then another: “Implacable November weather.” Three sentences in a row, and none has a finite verb. Then the mud, so deep it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill; the smoke, a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot as big as snowflakes, gone into mourning for the death of the sun. Then “Fog everywhere,” and a long paragraph of fog up the river, down the river, on the marshes, in the eyes and throats of Greenwich pensioners.

Readers often stop at admiring it. The maxim asks what produced it. One reading of the missing verbs is that a verb would name a doer and a time, and the passage offers neither, only a city given as a list of conditions, in a present with no actors. Mud that would admit a dinosaur has become geological, older than the people stuck in it. The court, named in the second sentence, disappears under mud and fog, and when the Lord High Chancellor returns, he sits, as the text puts it, at the very heart of the fog. Dickens names his target and buries it in weather, and so makes an argument about a court without making a statement about one.

Reading for cause traces an effect backward through the choices that produced it: syntax, the order of information, the point of view, image, and omission. Nonfiction repays it too. In *A Room of One’s Own*, Woolf’s narrator is in the middle of a grand digression on the psychology of the other sex, a subject she calls dangerous and fascinating and suggests the audience may investigate when they have five hundred a year of their own. Then the digression is interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill, which came to five shillings and ninepence. Woolf slips her central claim, the five hundred a year, into an aside, then punctures her own grandeur with an arithmetic fact, and either choice could be tested by taking it out.

Admiration stays with the passage that caused it, but a cause can travel; that is the authors’ account of why this works. “Delays the verb to hold the reader at the edge of the sentence” can be used on a different subject in a different decade. Read only one writer this closely, though, and the authors suspect that writer’s solutions harden into rules. Reading across forms and periods, and outside your own genre, helps keep you from mistaking one writer’s habit for the nature of prose.

Commentaries, teachers, study guides, and now AI tools will produce a fluent account of why a passage works. Any of them can hand you a reading, and a reading is a claim to check against the page. The gain comes from noticing the choice yourself, so a summary you did not test teaches little, whether you consult it before your own pass, after it, or never. A cause traced from one passage is a hypothesis too, since the effect may have depended on everything around it and a fragment is a poor test.

**Practice.** Choose one page of writing in the form you want to write, from a public-domain text or a book on your shelf. Beside each paragraph, write a verb phrase naming what it does for the reader: *delays the name*, *converts rumor into fact*, *changes the temperature*. Then pick one choice you think is doing real work, a very short sentence, a withheld detail, a shift in tense, and rewrite the passage without it. Read both and note what the reader loses, all within forty-five minutes.

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